2022 Review of Customer Construction Costs

 
 

CPS Energy is a community asset that is committed to delivering quality and value to our customers.  As we grow this community together, we will continue to work hard to keep costs down in every way we can. 

Our community has seen unprecedented growth and rapidly increasing cost for construction and labor due to both inflation. As a result of both growth and inflation, construction costs rose about 50% or more between 2012 and 2022 (see Figure 1).

Before 2022, CPS Energy had mostly held flat the customers’ cost for their construction improvements and additions to the electric and natural gas systems, also known as Contribution in Aid of Construction or CIAC (“Kay-ak”).  The basis of our labor and associated cost had not increased since about 2012. To ensure that customers are appropriately investing in the infrastructure created a need for CPS Energy to update our costs and develop a program to ensure we remain aligned. 

To that end, CPS Energy implemented a 5-phase approach to bring the cost of customer construction up-to-date with actual costs. The increases were appled only to CIAC invoices generated and delivered to customers after the update had been implemented, allowing the increase to be slowly phased in over a 1.5 year period, with final updates being implemented July 1, 2024.

See Figure 2 for estimated increases and the timeframe of the phased in updates that were implemented. The first increase included the Service & Meter connections to homesites.  These smaller projects follow a different process to help expedite their connections and due to this had a different overall implementation timeline as shown in the chart on the right. Because each project is different and requires different materials and labor needs, increases will varied by project. 

We held two WebEx sessions in the beginning of this review for customers to learn more and ask questions.  If you would like to view the recording of the video conference sessions, please click here.

We know that cost increases are an unwelcome but necessary part of doing business.  We will continue to do all we can to manage cost while still meeting the needs of our growing community.