Like Christmas in April, we're surrounded by sumptuous surprises. On Friday, the Labor Department came down the chimney with how much American households spent on pork, postage, pets, personal care products, pensions, and everything else during the year ending June 2015, including electricity.

My electric bill this month is $53.41. For the 33 days through April 5^th, the electricity for our three-bedroom Victorian house cost $1.62 per day, or 14 cents per kilowatt-hour. 

We took just 383 kilowatt-hours from the grid. It's not much. The national average is nearly three times that amount. But this bill of mine covered parts of March and April when air conditioning isn't used.

My bills have been this way for six straight months, since mid-October of last year. We've been taking 353 to 409 kilowatt-hours per month. 

Opponents sometimes mock utilities by invoking the infamous prediction that electricity will become "too cheap to meter." But it was the federal government, not utilities, that said this.

The Eisenhower Administration's chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, made the infamous prediction in a 1954 speech to science writers. He wasn't even referring to the nuclear technology that utilities would start using a decade later. 

You all really got into my March 22^nd column on the ten most influential in our business since 1990. I received a flood of e-mails from you. 

You wanted to add this FERC chairman or that utility executive, this RTO founder or that thought leader. Or subtract someone that was on my initial list.

The column two days later summarized your comments. Did that put an end to the matter? No way. It only egged you on. Another flood of e-mails came in. There was even an organized write-in campaign, it was leaked to me, for a certain RTO founder.

Ann McCabe is a commissioner at the Illinois Commerce Commission. The views expressed in this article are her own.

Five years have passed since Commonwealth Edison and Ameren Illinois elected to participate in the Energy Infrastructure Modernization Act, which authorized $3.2 billion in grid hardening and smart meter investments. As a commissioner at the Illinois Commerce Commission, I am often asked: How is it going?

Across

1. reliable critic: nerc

2. more with building block four: efficiency

6. assessment: ea

7. incentive program: ceip

8. more with building block three: renewables

10. skeptical judges: supreme

14. more with building block two: gas

15. not changing the ___: climate

Robert Redford, aka the Sundance Kid, in Public Utilities Fortnightly? That's right. The February 1, 1991 issue of PUF.

PUF's Editor-in-Chief at the time, Cheryl Romo, wrote about a conference she attended, hosted by the Institute for Resource Management. Aside from starring in everything from The Sting to Indecent Proposal to The Natural to A River Runs Through It, Redford had founded IRM in the early eighties.

Good news again this week. The Commerce Department announced February's numbers that build up to the nation's Gross Domestic Product, the GDP. Buried in the numbers, electric bills were just 1.44 percent of personal consumption expenditures. 

Over two-thirds of the GDP is spent by and for individuals and families. These personal expenditures amount to around twelve and a half trillion dollars per annum.