Our "smart meter" was installed well over a year ago. Smart meters are supposed to encourage you to shift your electricity consumption to 'off-peak' hours and penalize you if you don't.
Weekends are off-peak year round, which suggests to me that homeowners are bearing a burden meant for factories, but whatever. I've got nothing against conservation.
Problem is, I've been hearing stories about people's hydro bills doubling or worse. We're told hydro prices are going to rise by something like fifty percent over the next five years. This strikes me as being monstrously unfair...but whatever.
As I've said before, this house has electric baseboard heating. That's one of the most expensive means of heating a house, though one advantage is you can shut off the heat to vast swathes of your home. We do this; we like it cold in here. My attitude is, if I'm cold I'm either not dressed properly or not working hard enough. We investigated ducting the place and recoiled at the price: somewhere between $7000 and $12000, and that was five or six years ago. Given that our hydro bill is, on average, about $30/month higher than yours if you live in a house like ours except with forced-air gas...it's not even close to worth it. The ducting would pay for itself, all things being equal, in twenty or thirty years.
So rather than duct, we've spent money leakproofing this place. All new windows, plus a brand new roof. Both made quite the difference in our bills. But time-of-use rates, so far as I could tell, threatened to financially undo all our effort, and worse.
The system finally went live two months ago and we just got our bill today. Here are the figures for June 8-August 9:
Off peak (7pm-7am, plus weekends) 1508.82 kWh @ 5.9 cents = $89.02
Mid-peak (7am-11am, 5pm-7pm, M-F) 331.51 kWh @ 8.9 cents = $29.50
On-peak (11am-5pm, M-F) 297.68 kWh @ 10.7 cents = $31.85
--------
$150.87
That's two months of usage. Not bad, says I.
Unfortunately, the bill didn't stop there. Behold:
"Delivery" $82.93
I can pretty much assure you it didn't cost Waterloo North Hydro anywhere NEAR this figure to transmit energy to my home. I'd be surprised if it cost them a hundredth of this figure, in fact
"Regulatory Charges" $14.40
0.63 cents/kWh to cover somebody else's costs (boy, there are a lot of fingers in my power pie!) and subsidize power delivery to rural and remote locations
"Debt Retirement Charge" $14.38
This one really rankles. It's anticipated we'll be paying it until 2026. Don't you love how massive debts always end up trickling downwards? Americans, take note.
Total Miscellaneous Hosedowns: $111.71
...or 74% of the consumption bill
giving me a subtotal of $262.08
This reminds me of nothing so much as the travel section of the newspaper. "Look here, honey, we can fly to Orlando for $99 each! Oh, wait, add this and that and the other fee and, forget it, $417."
Personally, I'd much rather pay higher rates and not see all this gobbledygook at the bottom of my bill telling me there's a 74% surcharge. Likewise, I'd prefer this magnanimous gesture be instead incorporated into my bill:
The Ontario Government has taken 10%
off the cost of your electricity bill to help
you with the costs of building a clean
energy future.
ON Clean Energy Benefit - 10% ($29.62)
Especially since you just KNOW they're going to turn around
and hit you with
Harmonized Sales Tax $34.07
(which, incidentally, never used to apply to electricity!)
Okay, so we've credited the homeowner, but we've made sure
to claw all that back and more. On consumption of
$150.87, the total owing is $266.53
I'm pleasantly surprised this isn't four or five hundred bucks. What does that tell you about my "tax me, I'm Canadian!" mentality?
1 comment:
So about $133 per month in the Summer. Our was June $77, July $114 and Aug $131 in the Mile High city.
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