The Base Price and the Bill

Electricity customers in St Vincent and the Grenadines will pay a fuel surcharge of 86.71 Eastern Caribbean cents per kilowatt-hour on their October bills. The notice from St Vincent Electricity Services Limited (VINLEC) went up on its website in a file dated 26 October. A year earlier the rate was 56.84 cents, on the company's chart of its 2025 rates, and on March 2026 bills it was 54.90 cents. In a release on 12 June, VINLEC said the highest surcharge it had ever recorded before June 2026 was EC$0.7259 per kilowatt-hour, in July 2022. Every rate from June onward has been higher: 73.78 cents in June, 83.20 in July, 76.70 in August, 79.67 in September and now 86.71. October's rate is 29.87 cents, or 52.6 per cent, above October 2025.

The notice prints its own arithmetic. VINLEC takes what it paid for the fuel burned in the previous month, subtracts what that fuel would have cost at a fixed base price, and divides the rest by the kilowatt-hours sold. September's 786,816 gallons cost EC$13,140,202.63. At the base price they would have cost EC$413,035.87, about 52.5 EC cents a gallon. That left EC$12,727,166.76, or 96.9 per cent of the fuel bill, to recover through the surcharge, spread over 14,678,281 kilowatt-hours. September's fuel sets October's bills, so nearly all of any change in the price VINLEC pays reaches customers a month later. September shows how directly. VINLEC burned 15,608 fewer gallons than in August and paid EC$854,948.29 more for them. In April the company put the rise down to higher fuel prices tied to the conflict in the Middle East, together with reduced generation from renewable sources. It describes the surcharge as a pass-through charge on which it makes no profit.

The state has stepped in, and the notices do not say by how much. On 27 May the Prime Minister, Dr Godwin Friday, announced a waiver of customs service charges and excise taxes on diesel used to generate electricity, for an initial three-month period, according to VINLEC's release of 12 June. VINLEC added a discount of its own, worth half the customs service charge that would have applied once the surcharge passed $0.71 per kWh, and all of it above $0.77. The company called these trigger points and said they were no cap on the rate. Its release of 23 July put that month's subsidy at EC$734,959, with the rate after it at $0.8320 per kWh. The July notice shows the same 83.20 cents and no subsidy line, and none of the notices since carries one. A customer reading the October notice cannot tell whether a subsidy was applied or how large it was. VINLEC's press page carries no release on the surcharge after 23 July, and none on whether the government waiver ran beyond its first three months.

Each notice sets a single rate per kilowatt-hour, with no separate figure by type of customer, and VINLEC's accounts count surcharge revenue apart from basic electricity revenue. The company had 48,695 customers at the end of 2023, according to its 2023 annual report, the latest listed on its website. A household using 200 kilowatt-hours a month pays EC$173.42 in surcharge alone at the October rate, against EC$113.68 at the October 2025 rate. That is EC$59.74 more each month, before the basic charge and any tax. Across all sales, the sum passed through rose from EC$7,461,059.15 on March bills, the lowest rate of the year so far, to EC$12,727,166.76 on October bills, or EC$5,266,107.61 more in a single month. For the company the surcharge was already the larger part of its revenue. In 2023 it brought in 87,056 thousand Eastern Caribbean dollars, against 76,436 thousand from the basic charge, out of operating revenue of 164,425 thousand, the annual report shows.

Grenada's utility carries the same exposure under a different design. Grenlec bills the diesel share of its energy as a fuel charge, which its rates page puts at EC$0.7502 per kilowatt-hour from 8 October 2026, plus a fuel adjustment of EC$0.03910, on top of a non-fuel domestic charge of EC$0.4057 in force since 9 September 2022. VINLEC's base tariff already covers a fixed slice of fuel, so the two rates do not compare like for like. In September 2025 VINLEC said it would close the Cumberland 3 hydro station from 30 September 2025, citing the safety of homes built near its pipeline, and that the station supplied less than 2 per cent of its output. In the same release it said a larger solar farm at Lowmans Bay, replacing over half of that output, was on schedule for the second half of 2026, alongside a 5MWh battery at Cane Hall meant to reduce fuel use. October's notice records 786,816 gallons of diesel burned in September.