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Monday, November 2, 2015

October Proved Another Good Month for Savings under our Rates for 2016

October worked out very well at my house relative to my energy usage and peak demand under the rates that will be in effect next year. Using the "New Bill" feature of our Infotricity Energy Portal (as you can see above), my bill under the new rates would be $7.00 lower than it is under our existing rates!

In October Glasgow set it highest hourly demand on October 8 at 2:00 in the afternoon. Your EPB team predicted that afternoon as a possible monthly peak (and making that prediction so early in the month is very tough) so I raised the setting on my air conditioning for the afternoon and also put off any other significant electric power consumption until after 4:00 pm. That is all I did. It did not require any expensive technology nor did it take large changes in the way my home operates. I moved my thermostat set temperature from 75 up to 80 for four hours. The result was a contribution to Glasgow's peak demand of only .37 kW and that is the reason why I would have saved $7.00 under the 2016 rate.

We don't want to sound like a broken record about this, but if you are not monitoring your home's energy usage and using the bill comparison tool on your Infotricity Energy Portal at https://portal.glasgow-ky.com/ you are missing a great opportunity to practice changing your energy usage so that you can best adapt to the new rates which will go into effect on January 1 2016. But please be aware, if you use the comparison on the first few days of the month, it is going to look shocking. Since the Coincident Peak Demand resets at midnight on the first of each month, then each hour of the new month becomes the peak hour for the month. The result is that you will see some surprising Coincident Peak Demand numbers until the data settles and the weather causes a legitimate peak demand. 

Within the next few days, everyone will get a paper version of this comparison, just to make sure that everyone is informed of the coming rate change. This version of you bill will be marked clearly "DO NOT PAY" but it will offer comparison of your consumption for the month just ended as it would be billed under the 2016 rates. As you can see, these rates will be like nothing you have experienced before as they are unique in our nation. We are also launching a new website totally devoted to giving you more information about the new rates. You can visit it at www.infotricity.org where many of your questions and confusion about the new rates will be answered and straightened out. Very soon we will also launch our Infotricity Energy Channel on channel 2 of our cable system. The channel will add another way for you to learn more about your energy usage and ways to lower your electric bill.


The new rates will precisely track each customer's use of energy as individual usage matches up to the wholesale rates we must pay TVA for the electric power we all enjoy. After January 1 there will be different rates for on-peak kWh and off-peak kWh during most months and, most importantly, there will be a coincident peak demand charge which represents each account's contribution to the maximum hourly peak for the month. These rates should begin to reshape the way energy is used each day in Glasgow, and that reshaping will allow TVA to make more of our energy with lower cost, and much more environmentally sustainable, energy sources. In the long run, we will all benefit from a reduction in the construction of new generation facilities, and we will be properly positioned to maximize our utilization of renewable energy resources. This concept begins in Glasgow, but we hope it will quickly spread to other TVA utilities. As that happens, each community's environmental footprint will shrink and we will all leave the region in better shape than we found it.

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