Why are Calgarians paying so much for electricity lately? Here are answers to 5 common questions

There have been some wild swings in Alberta's electricity prices lately, and Calgarians have received some especially shocking news when they've opened up their power bills.

That's because Calgary is unlike other municipalities in how it calculates one of the many components of your electricity bill — the "local access fee."

Like the price of electricity, itself, this particular fee is a lot higher than it used to be.

And that's by design.

The City of Calgary has chosen to tie its local access fee to the price of electricity. So, when prices go up, so does the fee. And when prices go down, the fee comes down too.

It's been this way for decades and, for the most part, people haven't really noticed or complained too much. After all, when electricity prices were low, this meant even lower bills for Calgarians than people were paying in, say, Edmonton.

But these days — for a number of complicated reasons related to Alberta's complex electricity market — things have swung the other way.

Calgary homeowners are on track to pay an average of about $260 in local access fees this year, versus about $80 in Edmonton, according to Thomas Glenwright with the energy consulting firm Energy Associates International.

So what's going on?

Here are answers to five common questions about the whole situation.

Enmax Power, Calgary's electricity distributor, collects the fee and pays the money to the City of Calgary in lieu of property taxes.

The fee is mutually agreed upon between the City of Calgary and Enmax Power (which is a subsidiary of Enmax, a city-owned private corporation). The agreement must be approved by the Alberta Utilities Commission.

In other municipalities, this type of agreement is also known as a "franchise fee." Essentially, it grants an electricity distributor exclusive rights to access municipal lands and provide electrical services.

What makes Calgary's agreement different is how its calculated.