Sept 11, 2014: $10.63 worth of energy in 3 months.

Exciting news at the Greeny Flat experiment this week! We just got our electricity bill for the last three months and the total came to $89.51 which works out to $0.98c/day! And that was for the worst three months of the year (June, July, and August).

If you look at our bill below, on the left hand side you will see that our home used 329kWh for the 91 day period. Next to that it shows that the average usage for a home with two people is 1465kWh. So we are using less that a quarter of the average amount of electricity for similar homes in our area. And that doesn’t even factor in what we produced from our solar panels. On the second page it shows that we exported a total of 823kWh from our PV system. That works out to an average of 9kWh per day. Our average daily usage was just 3.62kWh. So we’re exporting more than twice as much electricity as we are importing. Since we don’t have any gas or wood burning appliances (not even a BBQ or petrol mower) this accounts for our total energy equation in the home for the three month period.

The total bill came to $89.51 for the period and of that $64.76 was for what they call “Supply Charges” (this is the daily fee that we pay (currently $0.7162/day) just to be connected to the grid) and $14.12 was GST. So we actually only paid $10.63 for the electricity that we used over the three months.

I find it interesting (and insidious) to note that during this period the “Supply Charges” went up while the cost of the actual electricity went down. As people and businesses are using less and less electricity the suppliers are having to charge more and more for the privilege of being connected to their dirty energy so they are raising the connection fees. Meanwhile, by lowering the cost of the actual electricity they are, in fact, giving people the incentive to use more.

The good news is that the Greeny Flat is proving that it is easy to build a house that is energy positive. All we need now is a viable energy storage system and we’ll be able to disconnect from the grid altogether, reduce our operating costs even further, and take the power back from the big corporations.

Sept Elect bill page 1

Sept Elect Bill Page 2

 

 

2 comments to Sept 11, 2014: $10.63 worth of energy in 3 months.

  • Daniel jONES

    A great post Andrew, I loved the breakdown of the Electricity bill and your synopsis of their rate changes, bring on those cheap batteries eh?!
    Daniel

    • admin

      Thanks Daniel. Yes, the writing is on the wall for the old-school electricity supply model. You’d think that, if the big suppliers were smart that would be positioning themselves to be the sellers and suppliers of renewable energy and storage systems. Instead they seemed determined to dig their own grave and go down fighting to the last. Oh well… go down they will and hopefully not take too much with them.

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