Union Electric customers who are not on the budget-billing program are seeing higher electric bills as summer rates kick in.

"That's not a rate increase," said Virgil Chirnside, district manager with the company's office in Cape Girardeau. "That is a normal occurrence."

Union Electric lowered commercial and industrial electric rates in Missouri in 1990 and has not raised residential rates in the state since 1987, utility officials have said.

"We have eight winter months and then four summer months that carry different rates," said Chirnside, explaining that the summer rates are higher for both residential and commercial customers.

The higher rates are reflected in billings to customers in June, July, August and September.

The higher bills now, Chirnside said Tuesday, reflect "the winter-summer differential, and as you move into the warmer summer months it's going to reflect increased air-conditioning use."

Higher summer rates, he said, are tied to the heavy energy demand for the summer months.

With both the summer and winter residential rates, there is a $5.75-a-month customer charge, Chirnside explained.

But the winter energy charge is 6.29 cents per kilowatt hour for the first 750 kilowatt hours of usage and 4.16 cents per kilowatt hour for usage above that level, he said.

For the summer months, the energy charge for residential customers is 8.674 cents per kilowatt hour.

There are a variety of commercial charges, but they all involve summer and winter rates, he said.

Chirnside said budget billing is a way to avoid higher summer utility bills.

"We do encourage budget billing, which levels payments over 12 months so you wouldn't see the big swing or fluctuations between summer and winter," he said.

Under the plan, 12 equal monthly payments are calculated on the basis of the customer's actual usage over the past year.

Each month the UE bill shows the customer's budget-billing amount and how it compares to the actual energy usage.

UE adjusts the billing on the fourth and eighth months of the customer's billing year to better reflect actual usage. At the end of the year, the difference between the budget-billing payments and the actual energy charges are determined.

If energy usage is higher than what is billed, the customer owes UE the difference; if energy usage is lower, the customer receives a credit on his bill, said Chirnside.

"It doesn't change what they are going to owe," he said of the budget-billing program. "But it does change how they can pay for it."

Such a plan, he said, allows customers to better budget for utility costs. "We have a lot of our customers on budget billing," he said.