This right here is a perfect example of what I love most about ColumbusUnderground.com:
A news story gets posted from the Dispatch about how AEP will most likely be passing along their costs from the recent wind storm power outages along to consumers through price hikes on upcoming electricity bills. You know, because they can’t afford to foot the bill themselves despite their billions of dollars in profit each year, or their despite their plans to hike rates 15% per year for the next three years.
A mere six hours, CU member (and resident geologist extraordinaire) RockMasterMike has posted a well crafted analysis of the situation, and proposed a simple solution that anyone can impliment to counter these price increases:
We pay about 10 cents/kilowatt hour for power (taken from my electric bill).
If this fee is about $1/month per customer that means that if you make a point to use 10 kilowatt hours less power every month, then you can avoid paying this fee.
10 kilowatt hours is the amount of power used by running one 60 watt light bulb 5.6 hours every day for one month.
If you replace two 60 watt light bulbs that you normally use for about 4 hours/day with equivalent light output 15 watt CF bulbs you will save 90 watts, or 10.8 kilowatt hours/month.
THAT is the easiest way to avoid paying this fee to AEP. It’s easy, and if you assume that a CF bulb costs $4 and you buy two and save $12/year then you will have a net savings of $4 after the first 12 months. If you leave your lights on more than 4 hours/day then the savings is even greater.
Turning your computer off for 2 hours per day saves even more for some computers/monitors.
If everyone in Ohio did this AEP would end up eating more than the cost of this fee, with no sacrifice required on any customer’s part.
If you’ve got a problem, CU can solve it.