Wednesday, May 14th, 2008...11:36 am
Gambling Rates
One of the pieces of advice you’ll often hear for lowering your electric bills is to use more electricity when rates are lower. Some people use “smart meters” to help gauge when power prices are down. Unfortunately, this advice has never applied to me. You see my electric company is PECO (also known as Exelon), which currently “caps” electric rates so that customers pay one rate across the board.
Despite this inability to use more power when power costs less–because power always costs the same–we’ve managed to lower our power bills nonetheless: we’re down to about $150 a month. Not bad with two preteens, two Tivos and three computers.
Yesterday, I found out that PECO’s cap on electric rates will expire in 2011. That’s sort of like how my oil company’s cap on oil prices expires next month–we’ll no longer be able to lock in a per-gallon rate next year. No surprise given how the price of oil has gone up in the last year.
Long before those caps expire, though, PECO will be giving its power customers a chance to “gamble” with electric rates. Call it day-trading, if you will, on power costs, but PECO will allow 2,000 families in the Philadelphia region to do a test run of being able to gauge when PECOs prices have gone down that day–and then they can up the juice on all of their electronics and, hopefully, pay less.
Considering that my husband and I used to day trade, and loved that rush of daily buying and selling, we’re thinking this might be an interesting experiment to try. Customers will be able to view PECOs ever-changing rates via the computer or a recorded phone message for the following day, and then make their power-usage decisions accordingly. Since we’re online all the time, this may not be such a huge hardship for us to endure.
The only downside? By enrolling in this program, which begins in October 2008, we take ourselves out of the capped rates almost three years earlier than everyone else. Then, if the variable rates don’t work out to our liking, we may end up paying more for power in the end.
Anyone here have had their power company offer a similar deal? Did it work out for you? Inquiring (and power-conscious) minds want to know.
