Late last week, the feds dumped a wealth of August electric price data on our desk. This week, we’re filling you in, on what it all means for utility policy and regulation.

There’s too much to fit in a single column. See yesterday’s column for Consumer Price Index trends in residential electric rates, by region. Here today is another taste. To get the full story, catch all the columns this week.

Late last week, the feds dumped a wealth of August electric price data on our desk. This week, we’ll fill you in, on what it all means for utility policy and regulation.

But first, thanks! Two months ago, on July 14, 2016, this column announced the new biz model for Public Utilities Fortnightly. 

Spoiler alert!  Here are the answers to the crossword puzzle, Rural Coops, in the September 2016 issue of Public Utilities Fortnightly:

Across

2. association of coops: nreca

5. original name of coops agency: rea

6. coop finance corp.: cfc

8. largest coop, in Texas: pedernales

12. main fuel of coop plants: coal

13. U.S. senator pushed to start coops: norris

14. fourth largest coop, in Florida: withlacoochee

16. in very many coop names: member

20. small Midwest state with eighty coops: iowa

Today we again mine the mother lode, the Labor Department’s Consumer Expenditure Survey. In extraordinary detail, it reports what households spent last year for everything. 

Let’s look at the electric bills of low-income households in the Northeast, Midwest and West. Low-income includes, for this look, households with income before taxes averaging under $30,000 per year in 2014 – 2015. 

We’ll leave aside electric bills in the South. Electric bills there are generally higher where air-conditioners are run harder. 

Today we continue to mine the mother lode, the Labor Department’s Consumer Expenditure Survey. In extraordinary detail, it reports what households spent last year for everything. 

Let’s look at electric bills by income. There are fascinating implications for utility regulation and policy. 

As we wrote last week, a household’s electric service averaged $4.00 daily. Or 2.6 percent of all consumer expenditures.