Toronto 
Winter TOU Hours in effect November 1, 2020 to April 30, 2021 (CNW Group/Ontario Energy Board)
The Ontario Energy Board (OEB) has announced new electricity prices for households and small businesses. The pricing will come into effect on November 1.
The winter Time-of-Use (TOU) hours and the winter Tier threshold for residential customers, which were maintained for the summer 2020 period, will remain in effect on November 1. The government had suspended time-of-use electricity rates, holding electricity prices to the off-peak rate of 10.1 cents-per-kilowatt-hour on May 24. The price was then increased on June 1 and a new fixed electricity price of 12.8 ¢/kWh called the COVID-19 Recovery Rate for customers that are on time-of-use (TOU) prices. This ends on October 31st.
The new TOU prices set by the OEB for November 1, 2020 are shown in the table below. The table also shows the hours to which those prices apply:
| Winter TOU Price Periods | November 1, 2020 TOU Prices |
| Off-Peak | 10.5 ¢/kWh |
| Mid-Peak | 15.0 ¢/kWh |
| On-Peak | 21.7 ¢/kWh |
| Winter Tier Thresholds | November 1, 2020 Tiered Prices | |
| Tier 1 | Residential – first 1,000 kWh/month Non-residential – first 750 kWh/month | 12.6 ¢/kWh |
| Tier 2 | Residential – for electricity used above 1,000 kWh/month Non-residential – for electricity used above 750 kWh/month | 14.6 ¢/kWh |
The rates means the total bill for a typical residential customer who uses 700 kWh per month will increase by about $2.24 or 1.97%, after accounting for the bill relief provided by the Ontario Electricity Rebate – a total (pre-tax) bill credit that appears at the bottom of electricity bills. The Ontario government has increased that rebate from 31.8% to 33.2% effective November 1, 2020.
The OEB last set RPP prices in November 2019.
The OEB is required by law to set RPP prices at least once every 12 months, and to set those prices to reflect the expected cost of supplying RPP customers. The increase in prices reflects a combination of factors, including those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, that have affected demand, supply costs and prices in the summer and fall of 2020.
When setting RPP prices, the OEB typically includes an amount to recover the entire difference between what RPP customers have paid for electricity since prices were last set and what the actual supply cost was over the same period. Given the impact on customers and ongoing uncertainty relating to COVID-19, the OEB decided that the difference should be recovered over a longer, two-year period.
If the difference was recovered over one year, the electricity costs recovered through RPP prices would have been roughly 1.6% higher.
