Daily Decision: Keeping it real-time

Throughout 2013, Adding Light will take a look at practical decisions that everyone can take to contribute to making our communities more ecologically and economically resilient. Everything in this Daily Decisions comes from experience or research applied directly by our family or people we know directly.

Much has been made in recent months about municipal aggregation and the reduced cost of electricity that can come from it. I have talked on other occasions how this "savings" comes from more political machinations and market manipulation than from truly reducing the cost of electricity. That said, from the point of view of the customer, even a couple of months of reduced pricing can help make ends meet. I will talk later in the year about ways that we can help put more capital in our communities through smarter energy decisions, but one way that we can see real savings in our monthly electricity bills - and set ourselves up to reduce usage and lower our costs further in the future - is to move to real time pricing.

In the Chicago area, ComEd has a program called RTP where customers get both a prediction of what the hourly cost of electricity will be the next day, and text notification when any half-hour price exceeds a pre-set limit that the customer chooses. Over the span of June through December of this year, we have paid an average of $0.043 for the supply portion of the bill per unit of electricity used (kilowatt hours - kWh) compared with $0.082 per kWh under the typical utility billing. This nets us a savings of about 25-30% per month (since supply only makes up about half of the total cost of electricity). The other benefit is the control we get over our cost. We can plan to use electricity-consuming appliances during times when prices are lower, and increase our savings as we get better and better and timing our usage.

The greatest advantage to customers from this pricing plan is that we pay regular attention to our electricity usage. In the first six months, we have reduced our electricity usage by 13% over the same six month period of the previous year. The month to month reduction has not been consistent, so we will continue to work to get better. However, having a meter that shows our real-time usage, and good information available online on a day-to-day basis gives us a much better ability to make changes rather than waiting to find out 15 days after the end of the month what we did the month previous. With everything going on in our lives, trying to figure out what we did 40 days ago to cause an increase in usage is almost impossible. Looking back to the day before and remembering that we left something on, or ran an appliance during a high-cost time, is much easier. We can then correct the next day and reduce our cost in that month.