Are You a Nasty Little Energy Piggy?

Time to move you into a 15-minute city…

Good day, Freedom Scalers. I am still traveling, and so this will be another quickie. (In fact, I am writing this to you from the inside of an infrared sauna. 115 degrees and climbing…)

For those of you who pay an electric bill, have you ever gotten a notice from your electric company detailing the amount of electricity you use in comparison to your neighbors? I started paying attention to them over a decade ago, and I noticed something odd…

We always use more electricity than “similar homes.”

After getting a few of these, it occurred to me—if these homes really are similar (in square footage, etc.), then shouldn’t we sometimes be below average, or at least closer to the average? Nope. According to the electric company, we are always nasty little electricity pigs.

We’re pretty good about turning off lights and such. We don’t have an indoor hydroponics system or anything that would draw a lot of juice. We do have a hot tub now, but that is a recent acquisition, and we did not have it when we first started getting these notices. Yet the electricity company felt compelled to let us know that we are ridiculous juice vampires. Every time.

I have a bit of a suspicious turn when it comes to authority figures (and an electricity monopoly qualifies as such), so I started to wonder. I checked into what they consider “similar” homes and found their definition to be absurd. I am in a sauna (121 degrees and climbing) a half a country away, and I don’t have any of the original documents with me (all I have is the image below). So I cannot give you the exact wording or metrics they used. Basically, though, they were including houses half the size of ours in their comparisons.

What. Is. The. Point. Of. That? How does such a comparison provide any useful information whatsoever?

You live in a three bedroom, 2.25 bath single-family home, and you’re using way more electricity than people in nearby apartments.

So what? What are they trying to tell us? What message are they trying to send with this useless information?

You’re killing the planet.

You’re sending us too much money.

Everyone should live in apartments in 15-minute cities.

You’re an energy whore.

What is the point here?

Irritated, I did an informal survey. I asked a bunch of people I knew if they got such notices, and if so, what they said. The result: Every single one of them reported that they were told that they were using MORE electricity than average.

Does that make sense? Granted, it’s a small sample size and an unscientific survey, but shouldn’t at least one of them have been told they were using less than average?

(And was my survey any less scientific than lumping people in apartments and houses together for comparisons of electricity uses?)

I have been meaning to do a post on this for a long time, and now is as good a time as any. Do you get notices like this? What do they say? Do any of them say you used less than average?

Inquiring minds want to know.

126 and climbing…