A response to the ‘Following FERC’ column by Bruce Radford in our April 2016 issue.
Rather than accept the rhetoric, let’s find out.
Friday’s data release from Labor Dept.: what are similar expenses to electric bills for the average household?
This week's columns have analyzed the brand new Labor Department data on how much American households spent on everything during the year ending June 2015, including electricity.
The semi-annual Consumer Expenditure Survey is the source for understanding Americans' electric bills by region, income, age, urban/rural, etc. The government actually asks many thousands of households each quarter to track every single purchase. The credibility and detail, especially through mining the micro-data, is unequalled.
Friday’s data release from Labor Dept.: average electric bill fell 1.2%.
As we wrote yesterday, it's like Christmas in April. 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.
Friday’s data release from Labor Dept.: Westerners pay $3.27/day for electricity, Midwesterners $3.44, Easterners $3.73.
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 utility keeps and makes money on PSC-set delivery charges, $15.51, 29 percent of my latest electric bill, or 47 cents per day.
My electric bill this month is $53.41. For the 33 days through April 5th, 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.
Nuclear didn’t make electricity too cheap to meter, but it fortunately was a strong weapon against climate change.
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.
Nominate the most promising of the next generation of leaders in our business.
You all really got into my March 22nd 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.
How is it going?
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?