The only thing that really bothers me is the loss of jobs for meter readers. I know it’s not glamorous work, but we need all the jobs we can get these days.

When I received my bill last December for Nov 15 to Dec 15th it said I owed $785.00 Two year before that I got a bill that said I owed $1200.00 in January.

This time I asked PGE to check my meter which they did after the third request – although reluctantly. 99% of the time I was told the meters were perfectly fine and the customer’s usage was the problem.

They came out and checked my meter on Jan 30 2010. The technician said it checked out fine – No problems. He ran a test that sucked 1 KW through my meter and my meter said I used 1 KW. A “Perfect reading” I was told. Something was apparently wrong but it wasn’t my meter the tech told me.
The tech however stated that I had an older meter and a newer meter they had would allow me to check my actual usage about every 40 seconds easily and digitally. This might help me locate my problem I was told.

My Jan 15 to Feb 15th bill arrived reading 1106 KW used.
One half of that bill was with the old meter and 1/2 with the new meter.
My March bill with the new meter dropped way down. But the month of March is always lower so I didn’t pay much attention to it.

However, all of my bills since March have been 30 to 65% lower with an average drop of 45% from last year.

2009
Mar 1299 Apr 988 May 1016 Jun 1080 Jul 1267 Aug 1434 Sept 1258 Oct 1434

2010
Mar 756 Apr 738 May 719 June 763 July 613 Aug 632 Sept 690 Oct 599 proj.

Thanks to the new meter I now know what I am really using and am now being billed correctly.

If my meter was NOT faulty why is the new meter registering so much “less” electrical use? I had an independent use check done and it matches the new meter. Wish I had done that on the old meter instead of trusting PGE.

The lesson is that a PGE meters can be bad even if their tech say it is not. The fact is, the Smartmeters seem to be having the same problems in some cases. Can PGE actually check the meters to find out if they are faulty? I don’t know. Based on my experience apparently not.

From what I can tell, I over paid PGE around $3200 in 2009 and $2300 in 2008. I don’t know how much the year or years before that, since I don’t know how long my meter has been faulty. I just don’t have the records to go back and check when my usage was about what it is today.

http://berkeleyhomes.com/blog/2006/07/13/uncategorized/today-is-independence-day/

I use numbers to graph the monthly usage.

We’re conservative neither in our politics nor our use of electricity, so we’ve not “zeroed” out yet. The biggest and simplest thing we did to reduce the number of electrons we eat was to switch almost all our bulbs to CF.

That’s a good thing for us Berkeley solar-roofers, because in the cool east bay we avoid the need for running air conditioning on summer afternoons, when our generation is at its maximum and PG&E’s demand is greatest. So if the solar installation is sized to generate approximately what you have been using over the course of a year, you wind up paying for “winter power” at off-peak rates beginning under 9 cents a kilowatt-hour while getting paid for excess peak “summer power” at 30 cents or more, and probably generate a net credit. The recent enactment of AB920 means that PG&E now must pay its residential customers for excess power generated, so that solar roofs now can be even more attractive economically.

Not everyone is rightly situated for solar, and not everyone can find an affordable financial path today. Berkeley’s “innovative” FIRST plan, an interesting option, has not yet progressed beyond proof-of-concept as bank funding still proves elusive.

However, solar roof or not, all of us will be paying more attention to when we use electrical power. Perhaps a bit disorienting at first, it soon becomes as routine as recycling — now an automatic part of most of our lives.

In general, saying more concisely what I said to TN:

Differential pricing should be available to large buyers for *surplus* green generating capacity, not for all power across the board. (Otherwise it’s regressive.) Differential pricing makes socially just sense for managing surplus, not for rationing.

(And: differential pricing for *surplus* electricity and gas most decidedly does *not* require universal installation of so-called “smart-meters”. There is no engineering requirement to justify that *at all*. It’s just plain wrong.)

PG&E has less supply capacity (and maybe, I’m not sure, less transmission capacity) than there is market demand for. That is why we have brown-outs.

At peak demand, the least green generation facilities do indeed have to be fired up, at least per the news reports. In the short term, if not the long term, finding a way to reduce the amount of peak demand is “green” – we agree on that much. I think we also agree that increasing green generation capacity is “green”. Yes?

Now, suppose that tomorrow we had differential pricing wherein budget constrained domestic consumers were effectively forced to reduce their consumption during peak demand periods (or else pay more to subsist than they can really afford). Do you understand what hardship this imposes on those consumers?

Nevertheless, there will remain *plenty* of domestic and commercial consumers who will *buy up the slack*. Brown-outs may become less frequent, but the total amount of *generation* by the least green methods will hold steady. Do you have *any* evidence to the contrary? That is how commodity markets usually work. Shortages don’t reduce consumption — a saturation of supply by demand just raises the price while some with demand go hungry.

In other words, PG&E won’t through some magic of differential, demand-based pricing generate less power using non-green methods – they’ll simply get more money for that power. But consider who will be paying what shares of that additional money.

PG&E getting more money for that non-green, peak-demand power is, in and of itself, a *good thing*, of course, assuming that the profit is reinvested in building out green generation capacity.

What is *not* a good thing, in my view, is the regressive distribution of where that higher profit will come from. A high-tech factory has a lot of flexibility with regard to scheduling their electricity consumption. The average poverty-level household does not. That places us in the position where the factories and offices will both pay a disproportionately low percentage of the cost of building out green generation *and* they will drive up the price of off-peak consumption.

Get it?

As for Rosenfield, my initial impression is that *most* of his work in this area has recommended and noted examples of reducing demand by offering domestic consumers reasonable substitutes for earlier products that help “pay for themselves” by saving consumers money by reducing their energy usage. A consumer saves money if, when they replace their water heater, they replace it with a comparably priced but more energy efficient model. A consumer saves money if, when they replace a light bulb, they replace it with a more efficient bulb. (All else being equal, of course). That’s great.

He also (as I understand it) has a notion that “smart appliances” can conspire with a “smart grid” to automagically schedule their consumption. Instead of setting your air conditioner for 68 degrees you set it for “not below 68 and not more than 75 and not more than $X per hour” and it talks to your meter and tries to optimize for 68 degrees.

Swell notion in the abstract – sorta. He has the plain wrong idea there in practice:

First of all, all that capital equipment replacement or upgrade ain’t gonna happen in the next decade. Maybe longer.

Second of all, none of that tech – not one bit of it – even if it could be magically ubiquitous by tomorrow – requires a “smart meter”. The “smart meter” is a subterfuge. It’s utter BS.

All that that smart appliance stuff requires — *ALL* that it requires — is a *uniform* power rate across all customers combined with a *broadcast* (such as a real-time updated web page) of the current price. For my icebox to know intelligently how to minimize its cost of operation while still making temperature guarantees it needs to know the moment to moment price of power. Period. It doesn’t need to report anything back to PG&E, not even indirectly via a “smart meter”.

Moreover, if instead of spot-pricing electricity moment-to-moment for all consumers, PG&E were to give all consumers a flat rate and big consumers a discount on surplus green capacity – then we would have a green solution that helped fund development of green capacity yet which was not regressive.

That is, instead of *raising* the moment-to-moment price of all capacity, we should instead (for the rare but large consumers who care) *discount* the moment-to-moment price of *surplus* green capacity.

See what I’m saying?

I don’t see how using electric dryers only at night is any more regressive than what exists now. With TOD (time of day) pricing, using electricity during the day will become more expensive as I think it should. It costs more to generate and proportionately produces more pollution.

The carbon footprint of electricity generated to meet peak demand is higher than for the base load because less efficient gas fired generators are used to generate it. Base loads are met using a combination of hydro, nuclear and more efficient fossile fuel plants. Renewable energy still makes up a very small proportion of production.

As to the cumulative effect of small electric appliances, I refer you to the work of Prof Arthur Rosenfeld and his group at the Lawrence Berkeley Labs. I can’t recall the numbers exactly but they are eyepopping. (I believe that there was an earlier posting regarding the professor on this blog.)

Advice like “use your clothes dryer only at night” is regressive (costs more for a larger percentage of poor people than for rich, regardless of electricity prices at any time of day).

The point of smart meters is to economically *enforce* such advice against small consumers rather than building out generating capacity or findings usage reductions by less regressive means.

Note that advice like “use your dryers at night” does *nothing* to reduce carbon footprints – zilch – in nearly all circumstances. It’s *not* a “green” act. It’s an act that helps PG&E make more money and that’s about all.

Trickle currents on remote controlled appliances are a different matter. There is some “green” benefit for cultivating the habit of cutting devices that don’t strictly need it from power. But how large? You care about those issues so, not to impose in an unfriendly way but if you are into it — can you give some per-household quantitative stats to give us a sense of the individual scale of the problem? My hypothesis is that building out green power generation is vastly more important than getting people to switch off the power to their TV and that getting everyone to switch off the power to their TV will have a measurable but not especially helpful impact.

Power generation “miracles” (or, at least, a lot of hard work) are necessary if we are to preserve in the coming decades anything even vaguely resembling our lifestyle vis a vis electricity consumption. The biggest problems are modes of generation and transmission lossage. Those are the problems we should focus on.