02/20/2026
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘦𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘺 𝘉𝘰𝘹: 𝘏𝘰𝘸 8 𝘬𝘝𝘈 𝘊𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘜𝘴 $6,100 - 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨
Remember the greenhouse slide from yesterday? Here’s what that 25 kVA line actually cost us.
In 19 months, Kollektiv paid over $𝟔,𝟏𝟎𝟎 in additional utility fees under Medium Commercial. Had we remained Small Commercial, total charges would have been roughly $𝟕𝟎𝟎.
Medicine Hat owns its utilities, often framed as an advantage. But there’s a downside: businesses cannot shop for alternative rates or meaningfully challenge how the energy bylaw is applied. Oversight is minimal. One of my first calls was to the Utilities Consumer Advocate, and because the City owns its utilities, there was nothing they could do.
Repeated advocacy led to meetings and calls, but administration maintained the issue affected only a small number of businesses and advised we simply reduce consumption to bring kVA down.
The deeper I looked into the rate structure, the clearer the imbalance became. Medium Commercial and larger rate classes subsidize Small Commercial. On paper, we were Medium Commercial; in reality, we are a small business and subsidized others for 19 months.
Interestingly, only half of the 2,400 Small Commercial businesses have demand meters. The bylaw doesn’t account for this two-tiered system: businesses with a demand meter can be reclassified for minor overages above 25 kVA, while those without one aren’t flagged unless usage exceeds 5,000 kWh, which we’ve never done in almost 8 years.
I hired professionals, upgraded equipment, timed usage carefully, and adjusted operations wherever possible. We only crossed the threshold five times after reclassification. The 12-month mandate felt like a penalty box of sorts, where a single spike could erase months of careful compliance.
Tomorrow, I’ll show how this reclassification impacted far more than our utility bill. It limited operations, constrained growth, and turned every day into a calculated risk. The $6,100 was just the entry fee…the real cost was staying in the room.
