Farmers might charge more if they could, but feel fenced in by competition from imports. Many hotels have tacked on energy surcharges to their daily rates. There's also a sense that the full price of higher power hasn't been paid yet. Regardless of what happens next, a significant price is already being paid in shrinking profits, higher costs and lost business. The second group has it worse.
Most apartment buildings meter each apartment, and the tenant pays the energy bill.
But at least half of the complexes more than 20 years old have central water heaters that serve the whole complex, so the landlord pays, said Dennis Treadaway, president of FPI Management Inc., a Sacramento company that manages 22,500 apartments in 200 complexes. Among newer complexes, perhaps one in four has central heaters, or master boilers. The experience of one local landlord, Interland Corp., tells the story. It would be too big of a rent hike. It seems pretty unfair.