As a society, sometimes we do a great job helping those in need and other times we make their lives worse with good intentions. One of the most important tools we can give people is an education. Regrettably, our system is a failure.
Electricity is just one place where we do some very funny things to “help” people. My recent acquisition of an electric car highlights the problem. In order to encourage people who have an electric car to use electricity right, my local utility has a plan where the night rates of electricity are 25% of the day rates. If I charge at night, I can get 40 miles out of my car for about 64 cents.
Lets put that into gas price terms. My record is 60 miles per gallon and I have averaged 40 miles per gallon, and 40 miles per electric charge. I can pay 64 cents for electricity by charging at night or $4.10 cents for premium gas. I have a Chevy Volt which can use electricity or gas.
Very quickly I have learned how to program everything in my house that uses electricity from 6pm to 6am when my rates are dirt cheap. The the day rates are three or four times higher than the night rates so I adjusted everything. My home is 100% CFL and LED lighting, all of our appliances are the newer energy star and we can program them to run between 6 pm and 6 am.
Out of curiosity I did a little research and found that my rates more closely resemble the way utilities pay for electricity. So my question is, why doesn’t everyone pay for electricity this way? If we want to train people to use electricity smarter, we should charge them in accordance with costs and educate them to use electricity smarter.
Why don’t we? My guess is the people who work less have more time to argue with the politicians. The politicians make the rules to appease the “vocal minority” and stay in office, nothing more.
The people who really want to use electricity more in the day time can add solar panels that can create power during the high cost hours. I work from home so I would still benefit from solar panels, and I am planning to add them next with my new roof.
At the end of the day, I would set electric rates based on the costs to the utilities. Instead of taking the easy way out and subsidizing day time use with higher night rates, the rules should encourage smarter use and to reduce day time generation costs by increasing the number of commercial buildings that have solar power. Looking down across the country I see acres of flat roofs that look like great candidates for solar panles.
When the demand is highest for Air Conditioning it is also the best time for solar panels to generate power. If I were king, I would start by aligning the costs of using electricity with the real costs of generating it. This alone should be a major influence to getting commercial interests to support solar and create an overall greater benefit to everyone.
What would you do?
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Thank you for your insights.