The people left in the dark and in the cold weren’t paying to have their Houston Electricity Plans off. However, try heating a home from 24 degrees copy to 68 degrees. Each additional degree raises your heating costs by about 3%. Multiply that by 44 degrees. The money you saved while shivering in the dark has now been spent and perhaps then some. If you were in the blackout for a long time, you might see a higher bill than usual. To all of you who didn’t lose electricity, many of you with apparatus systems who have the flamboyant screen for a thermostat may have seen it read “emergency heating.” It goes on automatically around 30-35 degrees typically when temperatures outside are way below that.
While emergency heat keeps your house nice and toasty, it consumes up to 50% more energy than a heat pump. If you keep your thermostat above the mid to high 60s, for instance, and emergency heat runs tons, be prepared for a potentially big spike in your next utility bill.
Electricity costs
You have an electricity plan. But do you know what it is? When you signed up for electric service, you chose an idea with a particular quiet rate. You either get an indexed rate, a variable rate, or hopefully, a hard and fast rate. Log onto your electricity account or find the paperwork to make certain.
The reason is that electricity is bought and sold in bulk before most consumers get their hands on it. Due to supply and demand being out of whack this week, the wholesale cost of electricity in Texas increased. 1 megawatt went from $50 to $9,000. If you’re on a fixed-rate plan, what you pay per kilowatt-hour isn’t suffering from that. Some customers and even some electric companies can surprise themselves with elevated rates if they’re on an indexed or variable plan. One provider is even “suggesting that our members switch to a special provider with a tough and fast rate.” Yeah, save yourselves, customers. In another contest, customers who reduce their usage by 10% will have a chance to win a Tesla. So if you’re not on a hard and fast rate, you’ll want to undertake to urge on one. Texans can buy electric providers and plans here.
Electricity for businesses
Some of us may don’t have that luxury. Those who use tons of juice, like businesses, prefer these unstable plans because usually, the plans are cheap. But now, they need to be gone from paying 3 or 4 pennies per kilowatt-hour to now almost 1 / 4 per kilowatt-hour.
With rates like those, businesses that have already been affected by the pandemic may be unable to afford electricity.
Bracing for higher bills, across the board
South Central Texas customers as well as those with fixed rates with other providers have more to do. The most important factor determining your owed amount still remains the amount of energy you used during the days leading up to the outages. Austin Energy said many of its customers were likely using far more energy in the days leading up to the outages because the area started feeling frigid temperatures last Friday. Still, they vowed customers would only be charged for times their meter was running, with power available. When customers use more than average, their bills will be higher.
