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I can't make sense of this statement as an analogy, although I can make some sense of the article as a whole. Electricity is electricity. It's not peaches and cabbages and flour and fish and a bunch of other stuff. It's just an undifferentiated commodity measurable with one number - kilowatt hours (or megajoules if you like.)
If I need flour, I just buy a bag of flour, and am billed a single number. If I need more, I buy a big bag and get billed a larger number. I don't hold up the checkout line by saying, this bit of the bag is for scones, this bit is for cookies, this bit for bread; please, Ms. Grocer, let's waste my time and yours by giving me a bazillion time-consuming little flour bills. Like electricity, flour is just an undifferentiated commodity.
Now, if we're really saying that for the airy philosophical reason that we don't want to put underworked politicians through the trouble of facing down luddites and NIMBYs ("buying Ontario time"), we want to make the purchase of electricity into an artificially complicated, laborious, time-wasting process where we're constantly swiping cards and reading dials - and ruining our day and our frozen food every time the damned card reader breaks - why don't we just say it that succinctly and move on? Or, instead of yet again "buying time", why not just kick those lazy politicians off their plush bottoms and get it done? Or, if the goal is really a steady state in place of exponential growth, put an end to immigration and population growth?
I assume that it's the fact that the undifferentiated commodity can do many different things (costing very different amounts of kwH) that Stoneleigh is alluding to,
Peter.
This program was designed for low-income people. I would assume that for more affluent customers that one would be able to prepay the desired amount via a bank account bill pay transaction much like you can pay your utilities currently. By putting a sufficient amount into your account at the start of each month you would not have to worry about having your electricity shut off.
I sort of do this with my water bill anyway. Our rates here are so low that it isn't worth it to me to worry about forgetting to pay and having my water shut off, that I usually have a credit balance. The minimum charge is $8 and I rarely go over, so everytime my credit balance goes below $8 I send them $30 and then don't need to worry about it for 3-4 months.
There is a difference between off peak times and peak demand times when all the simple-cycle gas-fired combustion turbines are buring expensive fuel inefficently. Much of the degradation of transformers occurs during the brief periods of maximum temperature on those hot, high-demand days. Investment in more generation and transission capacity is driven by growth in peak demand.
That's what the analogy is about.
(1) Time of day effects can be taken care of in a simple manner with a (logically) simple time-of-day meter. During the 'rush hours', charges can be higher, as on some subway systems. Of course, if one wants to split hairs by having a continuous consumer-level auction, then dials and bleepers and lights and mindless complexity are probably needed - but
(2) I see little harm in some, or even considerable, imprecision, for the sake of simplicity, in time of day billing, because electricity has become a life-support system, a highly inappropriate place for the goal of a continuous auction, which is merely to save a few pennies by time-shifting. Anything that tends to require moderate overcapacity in generators, transformers, transmission lines, etc., will save lives by improving robustness. Reliable service at peak times will have but little effect on total consumption, and total consumption is not best addressed by killing people randomly on the coldest or hottest day of the year anyhow. And neither shiftless power-hungry NIMBY-obsessed politicians, nor quarterly-statement-driven business people, nor feckless consumers, will invest in robustness on their own - but when they are caught out, feckless consumers (or their heirs) will waste not a microsecond in filing huge lawsuits paid for by all.
BTW Kill-a-Watt type devices have become fairly cheap and are useful in learning the effects of specific (and not hard-wired) appliances, which may be obscured when they are aggregated on the main meter. IIRC somebody on Drumbeat may even have mentioned lending those out at public libraries.
The difference between electricity and conventional food shopping is this: If you are trying to save money on your food bill you can substitute less expensive foods for more expensive ones (broccoli instead of asparagus, salmon instead of lobster, store brand products instead of major brand, fruits/veggies that are in season instead of ones flown half way around the world, etc); with electricity, the average consumer doesn't have any idea between the relative costs of running two different televisions, various different lights, using the toaster oven verses a microwave verses the regular oven, etc.
One thing consumers really need is a Kill-A-Watt power usage monitor. It's basically a power strip that measures the power and energy going through it. You can learn very quickly where your power is going. One surprising example for me: my Mac Mini Duo + external hard disk + 23-inch LCD monitor + laser printer + digital TV tuner + powered TV ariel all together draw LESS power when in standby than my cell-phone charger even when the cell phone isn't present! So, instead of carefully shutting down all my computer equipment every night I spend less time and gain more by unplugging the cell phone charger. As for the toaster oven verses microwave verses regular oven: the microwave is the most efficient by far; the toaster oven is better for small/short tasks, but the regular oven eventually gains ground due to its insulation.
Where can I get a Kill-A-Watt power useage monitor and what is the approximate cost?
Just type Kill A Watt into Google. I see several on Amazon for about $25.
I've heard 'kill-a-watt' is good but I use a 'Watt's Up'. It will connect to a PC and give recorded data over a long period, pricing, voltage & piles of other stuff but costs 5 times as much.
www.doubleed.com
www.wattsupmeters.com/
Thanks for the links !!
I was just in to a local tool house asking if anyone was making a watt recording device with a RS232 interface.
Of course USB is better as it is
the updated serial interface.
Where IS that 'Theory of Everything' ?
Here
it is !
Not all forms of electricity generation are the same. Sometimes it is water or wind flow through a turbine, sometimes coal in a boiler, sometimes uranium in a reactor, and sometimes natural gas in a turboshaft engine. A few places it is oil in a diesel engine. Usually it is a mix of all of these sources. The cost of electricity is the amortized cost of capital equipment, the cost of fuel, and taxes. A really smart meter would give me the percentages of each fuel source be used at a particular time in my area allowing me to turn off loads when high carbon sources dominate and turning on loads when clean sources are dominate.