What Are Your Electricity Costs?

[Ryan Mooney]

Oh, and we have to pay for the nuclear plant that is broken and is not going to be fixed, and the one they are not going to build, ever.

That's ok, our rates were raised to pay for them to put in load banks so they could burn the excess power coming off of the windmills.. that were paid for with tax subsidies. It appears that the load banks are being replaced with transformers so they can sell some of the power to CA at a tidy profit though so there's that..

[Steve Peterson]

In northern California PG&E charges a tiered rate starting at $0.16 going up to $0.34. This is why I now have 7kW of solar generation on my roof. Oh, and I've definitely saved 10s of dollars a month switching to LEDs in most fixtures.

I am on PG&E also. Their rates plus the 30% tax credit make it really effective to put in solar, especially if you have any tier 3 usage at $0.34. We put in enough solar to cover about half of our kwh. This should eliminate all of our tier 3 usage and most of our tier 2, cutting our bill down to about 1/4 of what it used to be.

Steve

[Rich Enders]

Final total for 2014 was 11.7 cents per kilowatt hour. That includes roughly 5 months of "summer" with extensive Tier 3 usage.

[Shawn Pixley]

Here, we have a tiered system. Lowest two tiers are around $0.08 / kWH. Tier 4 is about $ 0.36 / kWH. Tier 5 is higher. I installed solar and now get rebates. But the last conversation on this turned political and acrimonious, so I'll shut up now.

[Evan Patton]

I am on PG&E also. Their rates plus the 30% tax credit make it really effective to put in solar, especially if you have any tier 3 usage at $0.34. We put in enough solar to cover about half of our kwh. This should eliminate all of our tier 3 usage and most of our tier 2, cutting our bill down to about 1/4 of what it used to be.

Steve

It didn't take too much figuring that I'd get a much better return on my cash by installing solar panels than leaving it in the bank. Of course it's not a very liquid investment! Our 7 kWHr installation should produce more energy than we use in the summer (we don't use AC much), but due to geometry won't cover our usage in the winter months, so we should net out to about $0 for the year. Payback is estimated at 6 1/2 years, but my buddy used the same company and achieved 4 1/2 year payback with some modest conservation, watching when they used power, etc. so the estimates are fairly conservative.