The public naturally believes that most electric utility costs are variable, if only because utility bills are mainly based on per kilowatt-hour rates. Utilities' fixed costs, for generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure, are largely invisible to the average person.

November 2015 new house sales were 4 percent greater than the prior month and 9 percent greater than November 2014. More importantly, from the perspective of the electric utility industry, as well as the natural gas utility industry, new house sales in the South were 5 percent greater than the prior month and 19 percent greater than November 2014.

What happens in the South is crucial to the national numbers on electricity. To show why, look at the regional breakdown of electricity sales.

Coal has always produced the most electricity for the grid, compared to other sources, until a few recent months when coal was temporarily surpassed by natural gas. That's what the panelist said, in a seminar last week about electric utilities.

It's true that coal has led. But hydro ran neck and neck with coal well into the 1930's. And up until 1947, hydro produced over a third of the grid's electricity.

The IEEE Spectrum article posted by Markus Krajewski of the University of Basel, Switzerland, opens like a mystery thriller (posted September 24, 2014). The secret meeting in Geneva 92 years ago still haunts how we light our world today.  

All the major manufacturers of lightbulbs met to split up the world market among them. Soon enough they found a way to accelerate the market's expansion as well:

"In carefully crafting a lightbulb with a relatively short life span, the cartel thus hatched the industrial strategy now known as planned obsolescence."

The epic battle was played out in US District Court, Eastern District South Carolina, Judge Harry Watkins presiding. In this grudge match of 60 years ago, nothing less than the icons of the investor-owned and rural cooperative utilities were at stake.  

We've all heard it said so many times, a variation of:

"By 2050 (or some other year in the future), a hundred percent (or some other high percent) of our electricity will come from renewables like wind and solar."

A key phrase is at the very end.  The words "like wind and solar" imply there's a list of renewables that'll dramatically ramp up their share of the electric generation mix, a list in which wind and solar are merely examples.  

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote an article for Public Utilities Fortnightly, in June 1931, he was governor of the state of New York and a strong contender for the Democratic nomination for the 1932 presidential election.  What drove FDR to write the two-page article?  

The PUF editors asked the soon-to-be-president: 

"... whether or not it will be possible for a privately owned public utility company to earn a reasonable return on its investment in New York, notwithstanding the enactment of all of the so-called progressive proposals?"  

The latest Energy Department data reports that home solar roofs generated 5,111 thousand megawatt-hours during the first ten months of last year.  This represents a 42% increase over the first ten months of the prior year, a hefty gain.

Yet, home solar roofs still contribute less than half of all the megawatt-hours produced by distributed solar.  And the power made by home solar is dwarfed by that made by utility scale solar that is four times greater (by more if solar thermal is included) and by utility scale wind that is thirty times greater.  

A November 2015 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, found there's a major downside to the latest television technology that we all crave, ultra high-definition (UHD, or 4K).  Replacing all of America's televisions of at least 36 inches with UHD would increase the nation's electric bills by a billion dollars, to pay for eight billion more kilowatt-hours.  Five million more tons of carbon dioxide would be emitted.

For the first nine months of last year, through September 2015, households used 3.4 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas.  Usage was down by 2.5% as compared to the same period of the prior year, 2014.  The difference, mainly a weaker January, and March as well.  These months in 2014 were much colder in 2014 than in 2015.  

The all-time record year for residential gas consumption was 1996,  and second place is held by 1972.  Third place is held by 2014, when consumption was only 2.9% short of 1996 and 0.8% of 1972.