Monitoring Electricity Costs

There are two ways to evaluate cheaper electricity costs. One is the per kWh rate and the other is the monthly bill. A successful home electrification project will lower the former while increasing the latter. In fact, if we get this right, your monthly electric bills will go up considerabley, but your overabll energy bills will go down.

Of course, any decisions we make about home electrification are going to have financial implications, some of which are going to be quite large.

Electric cars are still more expensive than gas-powered ones but the cost of charging an EV is less than running one on gasoline. Induction stoves are also more expensive than conventional ones but some come with batteries that can help you during a power outage. and there’s no getting around the fact that switching from an oil or natural gas-powered furnace to electric heat pumps is a big freaking deal for most homeowners.

Here we’ll help you to unpack some of those financial implications, starting by helping you to understand what you’re currently paying. Then we’ll take a look not just looking at the real-time costs, but try to make predictions about long-term future savings. Of course, none of us has a crystal ball so all predictions come with that disclaimer.

It’s my personal belief, though, that fossil fuels will become more and more expensive in the next decade or so as various governments at the federal, state, and local level apply restrictions, taxes and penalties on their extraction and use.

Meanwhile, more and more incentives for switching to electric are likely to become available over time. Keeping track of all of those is going to be quite a challenge in itself, as is getting a handle on what you’re currently paying to your local utility company, and what might happen to those rates in the future.

It all gets quite nerdy quite quickly, but we’ll do our best to keep it simple and fun. And hey, nerdy is good if it helps you to save money, right?