Clever Alternatives Saving Your Money
USA Residential Utility Bills Continue to Climb Higher
In the United States, residential electricity prices have risen about 50% over the past 12 years, and they are projected to continue rising. Residential electricity prices are measured as Price/Kilowatt-hour. In January of 2004, the US Energy Information Administration(EIA) pegged the price of residential electricity in the US at $8.24/Kilowatt-hour. As of March 2016, the EIA has the price of residential electricity in the US at $12.36. That is a 50% rise in residential electricity costs, and by July of 2017 the EIA projects that the cost of residential electricity will be $13.29, a 7.5% increase from March of 2016.
Utility companies need a source of energy in order to provide us with electricity. The primary source of energy for the utility companies is natural gas. For quite some time, the primary source of energy for utility companies had been coal, but coal is subject to many more regulations due to the pollution that coal creates, and because of that utility companies have been leaning much more on using natural gas. Currently, natural gas is the primary fuel that our utility companies use to create the electricity in our homes.
Ok, so if natural gas prices have dropped over 75% in 10 years, and our utilities primarily use natural gas to create our electricity, then shouldn’t prices for electricity be dropping? The exact opposite is happening. So where is all of this extra money going? The public utilities have been taking this extra money and making obscene profits! You would think that we would catch a break at some point and they would discount our electricity prices since natural gas is so cheap, but they continue to charge us even more every year.
Public utility companies have seen their primary business cost, natural gas, drop in price by over 80% in 10 years. Meanwhile, their primary source of revenue, our electricity bills, has gone up by about 50% in the same time period. Their costs have gone way down, and their revenue is way up. The utility companies should all be thanking us for making them so much money, but all they keep doing is raising our prices.
Solar panels on your roof can literally eliminate your electric bill, and free you from the tyranny of your public utility company. Currently, government subsidies are creating a truly great opportunity for home owners to install solar panels on their roof at little cost. Taking advantage of these government subsidies is literally having the government pay for your electricity.
Government subsidies for solar panels are controlled by cooperation between the federal government, state governments, and local utility companies. The government subsidies that you qualify for depend primarily on what state you live in, and which public utility company represents the city that you live in. The only way to know how much the government will pay to put solar panels on your roof is to check and see.
