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Like many countries, Spain has seen energy prices surge to record highs over the past few months, and like the UK, seen a few electricity companies go under.
I’m curious, how much are you paying for electricity now, wherever you are?
We have a choice of a flat rate or tiered system. Both are tied to the daily price of electricity/gas on the open market, not an ideal scenario and one we need the government here to address.
If we choose a flat rate, as of yesterday it’s €0.17 per kWh.
Tiered system is, per kWh:
€0.19 for peak, 10:00 until 14:00 and 18:00 until 22:00
€0.15 for cheap rate, 00:00 until 08:00 and all day Sat & Sun
€0.17 for the remaining times.
Our whole building is essentially all electric, the cost to bring mains gas in is prohibitive and we are not allowed a propane or butane tank. Even the 55kg bottles have issues in respect of storage, and until we carry out certain structural work on the roofs, solar is not an option either.
We’ve just had guests who were here for four days check out yesterday and after checking their consumption, I worked out that if someone uses the heating here, it can cost us up to around €8.00 per day in electricity now. This is over double from 2019!
Incidentally, our heating is a multi split system, or as @Brian_R170 pointed out, in the US it’s a heat pump system.
Duke Power — North Carolina
$0.0901 USD/KWh + $14/month fee.
Home electric hot water etc., natural gas heat
Santee Cooper Power — coastal SC
All electric (heat pump HVAC)
Summer season - $0.1197 USD/kWh +$19.97 monthly fee
Non-summer season - $0.0997 USD/kWh + $19.97 monthly fee
I selected flat rates for rentals & personal home. Tiered rates available with discounts but at risk for load control A/C shut off during peak demand. Load control worked well for me when not working from home. Not good for work from home & vacation properties.
Current rates in Phoenix (from Salt River Project, not Arizona Public Service):
Basic Plan Rates
November - April: $0.829/kWh
May, June, September, October : $0.112/kWh for up to 2000kWh and $0.1163/kWh for more than 2000kWh
July, August: $0.1186/kWh for up to 2000kWh and $0.1299/kWh for more than 2000kWh
Regular Time-of-use Plan Rates:
November-April: 9:00-17:00 and 21:00-5:00 $0.0738/kWh; 17:00-21:00 and 5:00-9:00 $0.0998/kWh
May, June, September, October: 20:00-14:00 $0.0756/kWh; 14:00-20:00 $0.2123/kWh
July, August: 20:00-14:00 $0.0759/kWh; 14:00-20:00 $0.2438/kWh
The monthly service fee for all plans is $20. City/County/State taxes are an additional 9%.
We’re currently on the regular time-of-use plan
Our house is 2615 square feet (243 square meters) with a natural gas furnace and water heater but electric range and clothes dryer. In 2021, the bill was about $120 in January and $440 in July. Total annual electricity cost for 2021 was about $3100.
I’d love to go solar, but it’s not economical over the long term.
I’ve not compared nor reviewed much since solar panels cut my electricity costs by about 50%. I do have gas heat, so that’s not been affected. It’s the A/C in the summer where I’m really seeing savings. I installed a heat pump with the A/C for my STR suite.
My objective is to live long enough to recoup my upfront capital investment. It could be close . . .
Our electricity is inexpensive, even in the summer with A/C, it’s about $28 - $40/month for each 2-bed apt (about 600 sq ft). In the winter, it is down to only $10 or so/month for each 2-bed apt. However, our heat is natural gas and each apt is costing $350 - $400/month for that right now. That’s in New England. In Austin, TX with twice as much sq ft, it was the opposite, expensive electricity and cheap natural gas. But to answer your question, neither seem more expensive than previous years.
Electricity where I live in Mexico is dead cheap, as long as you stay below a certain number of kwhs.
It’s a tiered system, but has nothing to do with time of day- the first tier is up to about l50 kwhs of consumption per the every 2 month bills, second tier is more expensive, etc.
My base rate is the equivalent of around $3.85 per kwh. I sometimes go into the second tier, which is a whopping $4.50 kwh.
It’s that cheap because the lower tiers are govt. subsidized. When you get into the 3rd tier, you lose the govt. subsidy, and the rate on all of your consumption is charged at about 4 times the base rate. So folks who have AC and pools usually install solar, otherwise the bills will be astronomical.
My average electricity bill for two months is $12. But my cooking stove is propane and so is my water heater.
We have off grid power only - so in winter we use generator on non sunny days. Generator runs on diesel, which is delivered to our tanks. Generator also has to be serviced like any other engine, after a number of hours. You are right to bring it up - what the industry calls “slow” season, with reduced prices, is actually more costly for us. In summer if the guests overuse the solar power with A/C and such, on goes the generator again, to make up for it. We have industrial deep cycle batteries to run the house, they can only store so much.
Our cook stove, house heaters, water heater are propane, augmented by solar hot water on the roof on sunny days. That was a fun idea, but the fuel savings over the last 20+ years has still not paid for the roof top solar water system!
Our water heating, cooking, and house heating are propane, so our costs are very high in “off season” winter, when guests want summer temperatures in the house! Utilities discussion is very relevant!
Canadian dollars (and cents): on-peak is 17 cents per kWh, mid-peak is 11.3, off-peak is 8.2. Delivery is $46, and tax and regulatory charges amount to around $10. We’re getting a break to all-off-peak-all-the-time in January thanks to politics.
We run about $80 per month, so $960 per year, in our home, but we heat with natural gas and enjoy no air conditioning. Hydro One, our supplier, pitted us all against each other a couple of years ago by sending us personalized comparisons. According to that, our annual bill is $1,000 less than our “most efficient neighbours”. So around $2,000 CDN a year for electricity would be, I guess, a reasonable picture of rural southwestern Ontarians who don’t have natural gas. Our neighbours do not. The line runs through our property and Enbridge was reluctant to give even us access, let alone them.
Our Airbnb guests get no electricity at all, however, so cannot waste it. I highly recommend that.
Because the Federal government built the 2 dams that provide most of our electricity (all of our power is hydro unless the power line to the remote hydro site goes down, and the surcharge doubles rates when we go on diesel backup), we have the lowest rates in Alaska for residential: $0.1157/kwh + $9.55 monthly. I’m looking at the December bill for the upstairs, which has a separate meter, and it’s $123.73 but no one was there so I had heat turned down to 55degF. We had two weeks during that period when wind was blowing 75mph gusts and temp was 0 degF.
Back when the forced air furnace was working it would burn 10 gallons of heating fuel on a night like that, which is why I didn’t replace it when the ceramic firebox cracked after 40 years. I wanted heat pumps, but I need about $30,000 to do the whole house with mini-splits.
My hot water heater still runs on heating fuel that cost $3.329/gallon yesterday. It uses about 20 gallons per month when there’s no guests, twice that when upstairs is full.
Rural Alaskans aren’t so lucky. They pay up to $12/gallon for diesel in some villages where oil deliveries are by river barge once a year, if they’re lucky. More villages are switching to wind or in-river hydro when subsidies and grants are available. In many villages the schools is the big electricity user, so the regional electric coop rates are set to the school pays the biggest share of the cost. In central & southern Alaska, there is plenty of wood for heat, but wood supplies become very scarce north of the Yukon.
The cheapest energy in Alaska is in its furthest north city, Utkiaviq (formerly Barrow), on the Arctic Ocean, which has had municipal gas wells since the 1950s that provide gas for heat and electric generation.
I’ve decided to start breeding hamsters. Once I’ve got a few hundred I’ll order a gross of hamster wheels, a gross of bicycle dynamos and plenty of gaffer tape.
Our bill is ridiculously complicated. It’s .1189/kWh, but there are seven different other charges on our bill. I do pay attention to overall electrical usage and we are way down this year since we don’t seem to have used electric space heaters as much as last year. However we have oil heat and hot water and this year is challenging price wise.
