Posted on 06/03/2024 8:13:18 AM PDT by fwdude
My residential electric service contract is up in about a month and just checked the markets for renewal. The rates have SKYROCKETED.
I don't know if this is because of EV usage increase or just the general crappy economy under Biden, but it's about to price me out of home ownership.
Anyone else seeing this?
[Service company is Oncor.]
Apparently, AI is being blamed for massive use of electricity as well.
The car-mountable battery would also be used to charge up the car’s built-in battery.
I don't pay attention to the commercial providers very much but look at the Coop system's performance more than a little. You may be interested to have a look starting with the Power Generation component for our region of the country.
https://www.aeci.org/about-us/annual-report-financials/
Coops have a unique access to financing so that helps a lot but our base provider has managed to hold our cost of power to about 5 cents so far. Transmission and distribution add 8 to 10 cents to that.
Here on our little state highway we didn't get power until the 50s and we didn't get water until sometime in the 70s. I was here for both events, just barely for the first. Strangely enough, ground water is scarce in our area and the quality is horrible with iron and sulfur aplenty. You don't drink it so much as chew it and you will never need a laxative. Some people say that if they had to choose they would rather do without electricity than rural water. Coops provide both to us as well as fiber to the home internet.
A lot of the time I think the only valuable thing our country has done in the last 80 years is win WWII. Before that there was WPA construction and the REC bill.
Yup… And the rate. So many FReepers assume they are the center of the Earth and everyone knows where they’re located. Especially with the weather. “It got to 105 degrees here.”
You should have at least added an “/s” or told us where such a miracle has taken place.
They messed with Texas.
https://circuitdigest.com/article/tesla-model-s-battery-system-an-engineers-perspective
The Tesla batteries need cooling with water and glycol.
But lighter weight solid state batteries are likely to come into major use.
Here in Nevada County, California, depending on the time of day, the rate varies from $.47 to $.51 per kWh.
“about to price me out of home ownership”
Pricing pressures can cause major changes.
The greedy need to exercise self-control.
No person or entity is irreplaceable.
Before your scenario happens we will see some form of distributed power supplied by small factory built nuclear reactors. If we were smart, and we aren't, they would be Thorium based. Before anything good happens there will have to be a painful crisis. This is just about always the case.
Inertia, greed and stupidity block the solution to most problems. We have plenty of mis-guided stupidity and greed right now. The solutions are available but they are blocked.
It’s because the green raw deal ain’t cheap.
*************
That and growing EV, data center, and bitcoin mining combined with idiotic energy policies.
The price of having such a solar system with the ability to defend such a system and home when society has crashed is what I was trying to point out or even when a major regional disaster will affect macro power systems for a time. Having the ability to produce useable power for lights and small tools(even if there isn’t enough juice for the whole house heaters or freezers)and well pumps is the intrinsic payoff of self sufficiency which is worth more than gold. One would have to have the means of defending it.
Some get stuck stuck on the notion of “payoff of a solar system” vs normal stable economy and society prices for traditional electric and gas. Sure in normal times one would take years to recoup the costs of a solar power system and upkeep especially in trying to resell power back into the grid. That is not why people buy such systems. You buy such systems that will allow at least basic functions when the world around you goes to hell but with the notion that there might be some sort of future recovery of sorts and survival...expecially for younger families with kids. Thus having a functional system like that will pay for itself in the having of such a system when there is nothing else available.
“Many ancient cisterns have been discovered in some parts of Jerusalem and throughout what is today Israel/Palestine. At the site believed by some to be that of the biblical city of Ai (Khirbet et-Tell), a large cistern dating back to around 2500 BC was discovered that had a capacity of nearly 1,700 m3 (60,000 cu ft). It was carved out of a solid rock, lined with large stones, and sealed with clay to keep from leaking.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainwater_harvesting
Hope is a strategy. Not always successful. I sincerely wish your scenario happens but I'm not that optimistic because I believe TPTB are malevolent and their plan is decreasing the "surplus population" to their agenda levels. Restricting food/energy/money is one way to do that. I expect more vaccines before thorium power plants to "save" us.
Followed by:
That's a pretty good rate. We're a few towns outside of Austin, and we're paying around 10.3 cents per kWh. The rates inside of Austin appear to be in the 14-16 cents range.
My take: There may be other costs per kWh that you don't see in your bill (as a residential customer) and have to do research. In my case with Alabama Power, they add a fuel cost rider to the per kWh charge, then a 4% state tax on top of that.
If your bill doesn't have a full breakdown of how much you pay for every kWh you add to your bill, it may be that the only way to determine that is to subtract the flat monthly fees. In other words, in Alabama in May, Alabama Power's website says we pay 12.6207¢/kWh. But the true rate was 15.6¢/kWh. How can you determine that? On that same page it says there's a flat rate of $14.50 per month. Then on their Rate Riders and Rules page you can find the Natural Disaster rate rider, which is currently at 50¢ per month. Combine that with the Tax Rate of 4%, then the first $15.60 of your bill is just flat rates plus tax.
I painstakingly went through the other riders and those are per kWh riders, but they don't specifically say how much (they vary). The one that's probably largest is the fuel rider charge (if it costs them more to buy coal and natural gas, etc. to fuel their plants, they pass it on to their customers).
So if you're an Alabama Power customer, subtract the first $15.60 from your bill to get what I call the total usage charge. From that divide the kWh you pulled from the grid that month and you have the real per kWh rate. That's the in-depth research I did as soon as Brandon entered the WH 3 years ago to determine if it was worth making most of my own power with solar. Back then it was $15.86 in flat fees (the natural disaster rider then was 75¢, now it's 50¢, a fee actually went down).
“My residential electric service contract is up in about a month and just checked the markets for renewal. The rates have SKYROCKETED.”
Mine is up roughly 40% from 3 years ago (glad I bought a 3-year plan, but should have gone for 5 years!). I’m not sure why it’s up so much, but I suspect it’s mainly due to powerplants that were never built, but also the cost of winterization of the grid.
“I don’t think there are enough EV’s on the road for all these increases.”
Agree, by my estimate, if all gasoline cars were replaced with EVs, consumption would go up by 20% for residences, probably 10 to 15% overall - still a lot, but not catastrophic. What will be catastrophic is if all fossil fuels were replaced by electricity - then my guess is that demand would double or triple, and that is what the Globalists are planning to do, and is a HUGE FACTOR regarding their attempts to get control of Russia, China, and now India.
“Texas has electric pricing legal defects. The rate regulators allow absurd pricing at times.”
Only for idiots that sign up for variable pricing. No one with a brain does that.
“Join a co-op if you can. Those are usually the lowest rates. I’m on CoServ right now and they’re reasonable.”
Reminds me too much of Socialism - I’d rather pay more.
You just described one of the main reasons we have a large solar system for our home, and why one of our two cars is an EV (because I can't produce my own gasoline for my gas pickup if the SHTF like I can produce my own power for my EV, at least for local driving).
IMHO, most preppers who prep for a total doomsday scenario aren't prepping for the most probable scenario: the left slow boiling us into control. And the left has made it clear that energy prices are their main weapon of choice. So to me, a large solar array in an all-electric home and doing most of our driving in our EV (25K miles per year, with 15K of them charged at home), having power bills of only $80/month on average --- means my wife and I can enjoy life as always. The Dims' warmageddon cult and their energy price inflation hardly impacts our budget (the 17% of our power I have to pull from the grid, plus what little gasoline we buy for what little we drive the gas pickup, plus driving on long trips requiring us to buy gas or power). Thus less chance my wife will one day ask that we bow to the left's social credit score god just to have the comfortable life we used to have.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.