he Biden administration announced new goals on Thursday aiming at cutting utility bills by 20 percent this decade.
*this decade… oof.
Who are we kidding anyway? They’re still going to go up 80% over the same period of time.
Insulation, I guess.
I feel like the headline and the story are not the same
Crumbs
How is there a chance of doing this while also pushing electric vehicles? EVs are going to add a lot of demand to the grid. Even if every house has solar, I don’t think they can charge two electric cars, heat and cool, and also run their other appliances. There will be added load.
Also, I agree with the comments about focusing more on the overall supply of housing in order to drive down cost.
Who cares when your electricity bill goes from $200 to $400 per month when mortgage payments go from $2000 to $6000 per month in the span of a couple of years.
I’d rather pay a $400 energy bill and have a $2000 mortgage.
Why? Electricity is already cheap enough. How about you slash rent and housing prices instead?
Cheap enough? You’ve obviously never liven in an area with a utility monopoly. Our power usage went down by 10% YoY, but up by 20% in total cost.
We are heading into hotter summers, and colder winters.
How do those reconcile with your statement?
Last year our corporate-alike utility here in the midwest gave it to us without lube. I had made a bunch of energy improvements to my home and we ran our A/C at a higher temp. We used 30% less electricity than the same periods the prior year. Our electric bill was 40% higher over those periods.
Holy fuck that’s bad. That’s almost a 100% increase YoY.
Yeah you know what the best part was? Two utility companies had merged into this shitbeast a couple of years before this and for their merger to be approved they agreed to something like a 4 year moratorium on rate increases. However, the governing body which was overseeing this merger let them slip language in that they could charge additional amounts for estimated energy cost increases. Therefore this almost 100% increase was completely lumped into ‘estimated energy cost increases’ when in fact they paid something like 8% higher rates for their energy/fuel over that period.
80 cents per kwh here lol. I’m fine with high prices if they aren’t just profits for the owning class, but this is absurd
80 cents per kilowatt hour!
You owe it to yourself to put a solar balcony on.
You can usually get a 600 watt system that basically plugs into your wall and back feeds electricity to your house for something like $700.
Depending on your locale and climate that could generate anywhere between 3 and 6 KW hours a day on average every day year over year.
It would take approximately one year to pay for itself.
Have any links to such a system? I’d be all for it but everything I find seems to be intentionally confusing, pushing for you to just bite the bullet and pay a contractor to do everything, including trusting they aren’t charging you out the ass.
I don’t have a direct link, but a slightly more in depth review of the system can be found on great Scotts YouTube channel
I have a large solar array, which makes a huge difference, but it definitely doesn’t zero my bill. The most expensive hours are not during prime solar production, and I don’t have a solar battery setup yet
They’re not mutually exclusive goals.
