Also, Doug, don't be fooled by the exchange rate. What matters to determine what is expensive and what is not is really based on a currency purchasing power. So, even though currently the €/$ exchange rate is what it is, still, within EU boundaries, we purchase with € 1 what in the US people purchase for $ 1 . That's not an exact figure, but the exchange rate is just giving you a more distorted perception of how expensive electricity here really is. It's bad, but not that bad.

That is even more true for Andy, who is converting GBP into US$.

Milton Ontario, Canada with tiered pricing, depending on time of day. Currently on Winter schedule.

The claimed WAP (weighted average price) is currently around CAD $0.069818 per kWh

This however is how it breaks down

On-Peak 0.099
Mid-Peak 0.081
Off-Peak 0.051

That's the base price per kWh. However, you will never pay that little for usage. First, your actual usage is multiplied by an adjustment factor which for us is currently 1.0351.

Every bill has the following charges which are calculated as a percentage of your usage charges:

Delivery - there's a fixed portion and a variable portion. The breakdown/percentage is never printed anywhere on the bill, only a total. At least 60% of the billed usage though.

Regulatory Charge - no info on how this amount is calculated. Always at least 10.5% of billed usage

Debt Retirement Charge - no info on how this is calculated. Always at least 9.5%, but I've seen it at 10% many times

This all comes out to a more realistic average price of 0.13 before tax or 0.147 after taxes.

I haven't done any profiling yet, but we're currently using a lot more energy than I'd like. Less right now than at the same time last year, since my wife is no longer on maternity leave and we're no longer washing diapers. I work from home, so it's always going to be higher than if I were out all day.

There are never any lights turned on in the daytime and at night we used to have pretty much only a single 13W CFL running, however now we also run a few other 15W or 18W bulbs for a few hours while our daughter is eating and playing before bed time.

I run my PVR system with 4 drives, NAS with 6 drives, UPS, router w/Tomato, Time Machine AP, switch, voip adapter, and 5 cordless phones 24/7. My MacBook Pro is running most of the day and over the past few months I know it's been consuming a lot more power than normal thanks to the bad firmware on the Seagate Momentus XL that never allows the drive to spin down.

I'd like to get the PVR shutting down when it's not doing something active, like recording. I didn't have success when I tested this a few years ago, but I hope the software now works properly for this. Will need to test it when the recording season winds down.

One nice reason about living in the Pacific Northwest:

Energy: All energy measured in kilowatt-hours at $0.031081 per kWh.
Delivery: All energy delivered in kilowatt-hours at $0.030981 per kWh.

Something like 80 or 90% of our power is hydroelectric here, so it's very cheap and not polluting. When the glaciers melt it might be a problem though.

That is just wrong. Oh, I don't doubt your figures, but the pricing structure is designed to discourage conservation.

It should be just the reverse -- $.16 for the first kWh (but more than just 51 kWh, perhaps 100 or even 150) and then $.36/kWh up to 1,000 kWh, then an ever escalating scale for usage beyond that.

Keep costs low for people who really can't afford high electric bills, and make it very costly for the "wastrels". In Mexico the government subsidizes the first few kWh so that a poor family with not much more than a few light bulbs and maybe a small TV can afford electricity. We rich Gringos with our big computer systems and fancy entertainment systems end up paying a lot more, and I think that is as it should be.

tanstaafl.

I agree that it is weighted in favour of those who use more power.

But I can't see how you can say it discourages conservation. The more power you use the more you pay. You conserve energy you have a lower power bill. The fact that the rate lowers after a certain level of usage doesn't change that.

I kill 51kWh in less than 3 days.

Last month, our house consumed 679 kWh, which cost $60, bottom line (roughly $0.07 per kWh plus taxes and fees). We've got gas heat, so these numbers represent lighting, computers, and appliances. The big bills will be coming this summer, when we need the A/C. I'll be curious to compare them to last year, now that I've got the LED lights in, which both save energy in terms of lumens per watt, but also put out effectively no heat.

If LED lights put out no heat, why do they have massive heat sinks ?

Yes, it's a common misconception I think. While your average Maplins 3mm LED doesn't generate any noticeable heat, something like a Luxeon Rebel generates a fair amount, although I'd say the reason it needs a heatsink is just because there's so little surface area to dissipate the heat compared to, say, a normal lightbulb.

Our "smart" elected leaders have done the same here. Even though we still have a couple of nuclear plants, most of our electricity is also produced in France. They told us this would save us money. Of course the opposite turned out to be true (how strange...).

Same as with Bruno, over here the kWh rate is not the only thing that's taken into account when a bill is created. There's also the delivery costs, network usage costs, taxes, and a few other factors which I don't know by heart. Either way, it's expensive. Luckily we do have the day/night-time tariff which means the electricity is about 2.5 times as costly between 7 AM and 10 PM. Between 10 PM and 7 AM and in weekends, the lower rate applies.

Low-power LEDs are very efficient, but you can't produce usable room lighting at those power levels. As you increase the power, the efficiency of LEDs drops dramatically. However, Cree and Nichia seem to be on the verge of developing LEDs that outperform fluorescent lighting.

The massive heat sinks are to keep the LED operating temperatures lower, which radically extends their service lifetime. Cree claims 50,000 service hours for their current fixtures.

I bought a bunch of Cree LR6 lights ($70/ea. online) to replace 60W halogen ceiling lights. They consume only 10.5W and put out light that looks damn near identical. Comparably bright CFL bulbs, in warm white but with lower CRI, seem to clock in at 15-20W.

One of the real winning features of the Cree lights, relative to CFLs, is that they're instant on. No warm-up period. Another feature is that you don't hear anything. Where I have CFL bulbs in our house, I can hear their power transformers quietly humming away, which bugs me a bit.

LEDs suffer from thermal runaway issues so you need the big heatsinks to stop them from going bang.

The design of most downlights means that the heatsink is even bigger because the downlights are designed for halogens or regular bulbs which can tolerate the higher temperatures from lack of convection.

The reason why all nuclear plants were dismissed, in Italy, is actually quite sillier than that, IMO.
Soon after the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, USSR, there was a popular uproar against nuclear power in general. Which is naive, and yet understandable. A referendum took place.
Most political parties decided to take side agains nuclear energy and clearly most people voted against nuclear energy.

Sure enough, without even entering the debate about nuclear plants safety, nobody seemed to realize that banning nuclear plants is plain silly if the rest of EU still uses them.

Result was that we gained virtually no increased safety; but, electric power price, instead, indeed increased; and, such price is almost entirely set by electric energy producers abroad. In addition to that, we are still paying taxes to finance the dismissal of our nuclear plants, a quite expensive process; which, by the way, one may have hoped would be cheaper/safer in the future due to better technology. Not to mention unemployment generated in the towns where most of the economy was based on the presence of nuclear plants.

Indeed history is full of poor political decisions, but I admit I am still fascinated on how incredibly silly this particular one was. It is hard to find anything good in it even if you try hard.

... Not to mention that a part of Italian forein politics is heavily determined by the desperate need to buy energy aboroad, since we do not produce enough. And various dangerous diplomatic games have been played by our Governments because of this.

Again, a bad call of remarkable historical proportions.

A snap shot of our rates over a few years...


1Q 2008 3Q 2008 3Q 2009 3Q 2010 3Q 2011
Monthly Customer Charge - $2.93 $3.07 $3.16 $3.25 $3.35

Peak Season Apr - Sep
First 600kWh, per kWh $0.0751 $0.0787 $0.0811 $0.0835 $0.0860
Every kWh above 600kWh $0.0842 $0.0882 $0.0908 $0.0935 $0.0963

Non-Peak Season Oct - Mar
All kWh, per kWh $0.0751 $0.0787 $0.0811 $0.0835 $0.0860


Ross