Getting a huge bill at the end of the month does provide some incentive to save, but you never know if you used your air conditioner too much, or your washing machine was set to “hot” too often, or maybe your fridge’s compressor is failing. Hence the individual meters. Compare this to your cell phone bill, where every call is labeled with a person and a time, allowing you to instantly see where the money is going, and the electric bill seems positively antiquated. The electric utilities here already have the ability to remotely read our meters. Why not give the power to the people? Well, they don’t want us using less power for one thing, but that’s another post. If they really wanted people to pay attention, then a sliding cost scale in which the more power one used, the more each kwh cost would be of great assistance. I propose we could even make the base charge extremely low, and have a jump once a certain minimal threshold is crossed, then continue to rise as usage goes up. The minimum should contain allowances for the number of people in the home, and this number should be claimed openly to receive accommodations. A billing system of this design would appropriately distribute costs to the people who tax the system the most. Families with little money could easily have minimal bills by doing things efficiently. But how do they know they are being inefficient? Back to the mini-meters. It’s just more transparency of information.

Sure, we could go out and read our own meter every hour to see what’s going on, but that only shows our overall consumption, and it’s kind of challenging to get any kind of accuracy about present usage by looking at a spinning disk. Having a display on our computer screen of how much power is going down the tubes (or out the wires) from each outlet would be great.

Now, a bit of a rant. It is annoying that the most energy efficient appliances are the ones that cost the most, allowing people with the most cash to save the most money on operating costs. It would make more sense to give the most efficient products to the people who need to save the most money. For example, I would buy a fridge with much thicker walls if it used half the electricity of one with a larger interior. Give me a smaller compressor, an LED interior light, no ice-through-the-door, no other gadgets and gimmicks, but 6 inch thick walls, and we should have a cheaper fridge that costs less to operate than the best “normal” ones on the market. In that case I sacrifice interior size for operating costs. Hey, we can’t have it all, and that’s fine. People with money can spend it however they wish. But people with less money shouldn’t have to pay more. Why are the front-loading washers the most expensive ones? Why are geo-thermal heating systems the most expensive? Why is a well insulated house only available for hundreds of thousands of dollars?