Tancoo announces surcharge on high residential electricity use

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo has an­nounced a five-cent-per-kilo­watt-hour sur­charge on res­i­den­tial elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion above 3,000 kilo­watt-hours per billing pe­ri­od, a mea­sure ex­pect­ed to gen­er­ate $17.8 mil­lion in ad­di­tion­al rev­enue.

The sur­charge will take ef­fect on Jan­u­ary 1, 2027, and is ex­pect­ed to af­fect 10 per cent of house­holds, ac­cord­ing to Tan­coo, who said the thresh­old was de­signed to pro­tect house­holds with mod­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion.

Pre­sent­ing the 2027 Bud­get in Par­lia­ment to­day, Tan­coo said he had been ad­vised that 90 per cent of house­holds in Trinidad and To­ba­go con­sumed less than the pro­posed thresh­old.

“Ef­fi­cient man­age­ment of our en­er­gy re­sources should en­cour­age con­ser­va­tion while pro­tect­ing house­holds with mod­est en­er­gy needs,” he said.

Tan­coo said the rev­enue gen­er­at­ed would help fi­nance the ex­ist­ing elec­tric­i­ty sub­sidy pro­vid­ed to house­holds with very low lev­els of elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion.

He said the mea­sure was in­tend­ed to place the ad­di­tion­al charge on house­holds with elec­tric­i­ty us­age sig­nif­i­cant­ly above the na­tion­al av­er­age while leav­ing most house­holds un­af­fect­ed.