CtTaxed.com

Electricity Rates, Be Your Own CL&P

With the rise of Connecticut’s electric rates to the top of the country, another example of the gross mis-management of this state and the business of this state.

(Let’s debate Gay marriage some more and distract the masses)

It occurred to this electrical engineer that going off grid (supplying my own power) is going to start to be cost-effective. So I did a few back of the napkin calculations. For those of you not fortunate enough to know an engineer all great inventions and engineering advances are first sketched out on napkins.

The average American household uses approximately 1,200 watts or 1.2KW. Now a Home Depot generator generating 5KW costs approximately $599 and uses 6 gallons of gas every 24hrs assuming a 50% load.

Now if you build a hybrid system similar to the Toyota Prius, which is a gas generator charging a battery system the generator will only run roughly about 24% of the time and allow peak current usage such as well pumps and stoves.

A quick calculation says your costs would be approximately $75 to 150$/month for gas. Which is certainly in the ball park of my current costs of $150/month for electricity. And our rates are going up even more. This assumes some costs associated with equipment costs for batteries and the generator. For the basis of this calculation I assumed the state did not collect their excise tax of 24% because it is not going to transportation. Probably a false assumption of my part but I am an optimist at heart.

Now the real point here is that the costs have gotten so inflated that CL&P has NO ECONOMY OF SCALE. I can compete on an individual basis with low capital equipment cost, no power lines, no power line crews repairing downed lines and no huge power plants that won’t be built in my back yard.

I would see an economy of scale if I collaborated with my neighbors and did electricity generation on a 4 or 5 home scale and beat the stuffing out of CL&P on price. Now CL&P should be able to beat the stuffing out of me and my local home generator, but they can’t because they can’t build generating plants or run power lines.

Soon some entrepreneur will start selling hybrid home electricity systems, because simply it’s cheaper.

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