We sit only a week away from customers of SaskPower and SaskEnergy paying more on their utility bills.

Come April 1 the carbon tax will be added onto bills of both of the Crown corporations, but each corporation will be implementing it differently.

Casey MacLeod, senior communications officer with SaskEnergy, says that customers will see an increase of about $9 per month for the rest of 2019 and they will be implementing it on how much energy is used.

"The way the carbon tax is working is it's coming out on what will be a $1/Gigagoule for customers," she said. "For your average residential customers, this is going to equate to about $100 to $110 a year for the carbon tax."

SaskEnergy recently lowered their rates in November and is set to decrease them again come April 1, but with the carbon tax being implemented there will be no savings for customers.

The carbon tax is set to increase every year, and MacLeod says that customers can expect the same on their bills with an additional increase of about $54 per year through 2022.

"This first year it will cost the average homeowner around the $109 mark. That will go up approximately $50 to $60 on top of that each year in the coming years," she said. We are predicting, for example, $109 average increase residential bill for the first year starting 2020, the year after that would be about $163 increase, and then about $220 increase, and then about $270 increase."

MacLeod says that SaskEnergy is just collecting money for the federal government from its customers and will pass it directly to them. 

In total SaskEnergy customers will be paying about $70 million more the first year because of the federal carbon tax.

For the other Crown corporation, SaskPower, their customers will be paying $2 more per month and $18 over the course of the rest of the year which equals to a 2.7-per-cent increase for 2019 in total equaling to them paying $52 million because of the federal carbon tax.

Dustin Duncan, the minister responsible for SaskPower and the enviorment says, that their customers will be splitting the cost.

"What SaskPower is going to be doing is going to be looking at the overall cost that the carbon tax is going to cost SaskPower. This is on their fuel source largely on the coal that they use for the coal-fired generation units," he said. "Essentially what SaskPower is going to do is just take the number of customers that there are and apply it equally on the bill. We are looking at applying that consistently across all of the different rate classes, all of the different customers. It really just is the overall amount that they believe they need to collect for this year, and then each year after that but for this year certainly and then just applying that consistently across the entire rate class."

SaskPower won't have to make a payment to the federal government until June of 2020. Duncan says that until that date SaskPower will be collecting the money based on estimates of how much energy their customers use and how much they believe the carbon tax is going to cost them. That money will be then put into an account and then once June of next year hits they will make their payment, something that Duncan says he hopes they don't have to do.

"We will start collecting those dollars beginning will people's April bills, and then when June 2020 comes around we will have a better idea of how much we actually needed to collect," he said. "We will either have collected the right amount or more or not enough. We are hopeful that the courts will say no that the carbon tax the way it is being applied by the federal government is unconstitutional and if that would be the case then it would be our expectation that SaskPower would rebate the dollars back to our customers."

Duncan added that SaskPower would be receiving no revenue from the carbon tax

"We made a decision as the provincial government that unlike the federal government that is charging GST on the carbon tax, so they are taxing the tax essentially, we've decided that PST won't be applied to the carbon tax," he said. "This is truly not a revenue source for the province or for SaskPower. SaskPower keeps none of these dollars, and the provincial government will earn no income off of this, there is no PST being applied to this, so this is really collecting the carbon tax for the federal government that they have opposed upon us."

 Just like SaskPower, SaskEnergy will not be applying a PST to their bills.

Over the four-year period of 2019-2022 SaskPower is going to have to pay a total of $546 million.