We’ve wondered about the full story on our Naperville electric rates, ever since the Rocky Mountain Institute report revealed that the Prairie State coal plant is barely “breaking even” from an operations and maintenance costs (O&M) standpoint. We think that our fellow citizens, who don’t yet share our concerns about the climate and environmental risks and threats, might share our concerns about the cost risks of our dirty, expensive coal-fired generation.

We hear Naperville leaders say that our Naperville electric rates are better than our ComEd neighbors, but we never get to see the worksheet details and assumptions. Comparing the line items of a Naperville utility bill with a ComEd bill is not an “apples to apples” comparison.

That lack of transparency by Naperville, our power supplier IMEA, and the Prairie State Energy Campus are huge barriers to getting the facts, but we continue to find clues.

We found that the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) collects electric utility cost data, and we have used that data to compare Naperville to ComEd. The results suggest that Naperville electric utility customers are paying more than ComEd customers, even though Naperville doesn’t operate to earn a profit and Naperville customers don’t pay the Illinois utility fees mandated of ComEd and downstate Ameren-IL customers (the fees to support the Illinois Renewable Portfolio Standard and the fees to keep our Illinois zero emissions nuclear fleet running).

The following 3 tables are comparison charts that we’ve put together using this U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) data that is publicly available for download at https://www.eia.gov/electricity/saves_reveue_price/ in tables T6 Residential sector, T7 Commercial sector, and T8 Industrial sector. (Our downloads and extracts of the Illinois utility rows of those tables, including Naperville and ComEd, are also available in our EIA-861 directory.)

A copy of our spreadsheet, in xlsx file format, is available on our google drive “Naperville_ComEd_EIA-861” .