Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We're actually engaged this year in a major review of the Power Support Program. There have been a lot of concerns expressed recently about sustainability of the program. We, of course, share those concerns and want to make sure that we have a good handle on what's happening with the program across the Territories.
As the Minister already pointed out, about $8 million is our estimate for the residential component of the program and the commercial is about $200,000 to $300,000. We have seen very rapid increases in the last few years and a lot of that is because of significant changes in the rate structure that has been approved by the Public Utilities Board. The Power Corporation introduced a program of rate rebalancing a number of years ago, where they attempted to make the burden, I guess, of meeting the revenue requirement more equitable between classes of customers. What we found is that there was a shift away from the government as the main player, if you will, of the bill to a more equitable distribution between government users, industry users and residential users. The more burden that was put on the residential users, the more the Power Subsidy Program went up, because that increased residential rates significantly in communities. In some cases, rates over the seven-year period we looked at rose as much as 100 percent.
So the rate rebalancing had a big impact in the past years on the Power Support Program and that's pretty much done now. They pretty much stabilized and made the rates equitable. In addition for next year, we're not anticipating the similar fuel price increases that we saw this year, so we don't expect that the Power Corporation or NUL will need to make significant adjustments in rates for fuel prices, so that tends to smooth the increase out.
I wouldn't note that we had budgeted $8.3 million this year in anticipation of a new rate rider coming in for the higher diesel cost. In fact, the rate riders that have been applied for are less than we anticipated. So $8.3 million might be
a little bit high for this year and, as a result, we think it will be adequate to fund our requirements for next year.