Saving Money and Doing Nothing Else
Last night I was writing this piece, I was writing about my usually reliable power generation company ComEd. Well, today, and some 20 hours without power and no prospects for another 10 or so; and I don’t know if I would maintain the same opinion. Yes, delivering power during a season particularly hard hit with tornadoes is an arduous task. Yet the real task at hand is not even being discussed in the halls of congress. The task at hand is the economy stupid. The economy needs a poster child. That poster child could be cheap or free power (electricity, gas, etc.). Perhaps even a plan to be energy independent in 10 years. More on that in a future post.
Who Doesn’t Like Free?
Who doesn’t like free? Well, let’s start with cheap, or at least cheaper than retail. For those who are aware of utility deregulation know that you can buy power from alternate sources at a discount. This is not a new business model. Many of us have been doing precisely this for years with our telephone service. Yet only 2.5% of the 3.4 million residential customers in northern Illinois avail themselves of the savings from alternate power providers.
In Monday’s Chicago Sun Times, there was an article regarding this money saving opportunity and the people saving on their electricity bill. Link to article. After changing to an alternate electricity provider, ComEdison (or whoever your local power provider is) will still provide the cables that bring electricity into your home. In a similar way, the phone company runs the “last mile” of phone cable into your home and connects you to the national telephone network. Nothing changes except the money you save. In some locations even the bill payee remains the same. So you could pay less for your power and nothing else changes – good deal.
Or is it?
With the phone company, the level of service may change depending on the relationship between the end user and the ultimate backbone provider of the service. What this means is that while your phone service at home (if you still have a landline) comes with a bill from “Splint”, the service itself may be provided by AT&T. So if your service goes down, is it possible that the AT&T customers get service before others?
The good news is that the electrical grid isn’t that smart as yet – but they are catching up. They may not be able to determine the end-user’s relationship with the backbone provider so the rate of repair remains the same regardless of supplier. It doesn’t matter whether your power supplier is ComEd or BlueStar, a Chicago startup.
This was not always the experience in the telephone world where AT&T clients often realized service reconnection sooner than the discount clients after major outages.
All this however could change as the grid entertains independent power generators including landlords with sun-available rooftops who place solar panels on their properties. Extra generating capacity is sucked back into the grid rather than being disposed of if not used directly. A process like this won’t likely reduce overall power consumption, but it can reduce electric bills significantly and could lead to a reduction in need of new major power generation systems.
NYC recently commissioned a survey of its rooftops to determine how much power could be generated if every rooftop had solar panels installed. The study, completed with the help of airplane outfitted with special laser cameras claims that rooftops, if outfitted with solar panels could supply over half of the city’s electrical needs at peak time. Now that is a saving.
Originally published 7/12/11 in the blog Through My Eyes
