I've got a spreadsheet where I've been tracking our household energy usage and cost since 1995. There are a few time periods missing, but it's still a good "long view" of how much electricity we've used over the last decade plus. I know, I know... this falls deeply in the realm of OCD and geekiness. Hi, I'm Brad — have we met?
A few years ago, the Kyoto Protocol was making news. In a nutshell, the Kyoto Protocol is a treaty, and the nations which signed the treaty agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions until they were 5.2% below 1990 levels. The United States, (in)famously, did not sign the agreement. Dubya felt it would damage the country economically, and since he was already working hard on that with the war in Iraq and ignoring the shifting of wealth to the banking cartel, why fuck it up by trying to be a true leader in this bold new twenty-first century?
So since the Bush Administration wanted no part of this, I sort of tried it myself. Just a theoretical thing, from which — in Bradworld — it could be scaled up to the national level. At some point the Kyoto Protocol changed so that some nations were allowed to increase their emissions (basically those nations which didn't have many, or any, emissions to begin with), while others (those which essentially stood outside and sprayed Krylon directly into the air without abandon) had to reduce theirs by a larger amount. The United States would have ended up with a magic number of seven percent. When they started talking about buying and selling carbon offsets and trading them on the open market, my eyes glazed over. So after fiddling with the math for a bit and deciding there was no way in hell we could measure the true emissions of our household, I declared we should just aim to reduce our energy usage by seven percent each year.
It started in 2006 (we started recycling the same year for good measure). And as of the end of 2011, our electricity usage was down 44% versus 2006. At first, as the usage dropped, so did the price. But then despite usage continuing to drop, the price started rising. At the end of the five-year period in 2011, I paid slightly more for nearly half the electricity I used in 2006.
Here's a chart I made with the Google Chart API. If you look at the the blue line you can see where the amount of electricity I used dropped from 14000 kWh down to a little over 7000 kWh. The red line follows it down until 2009, and then, as Robert Frost might say, the two paths diverged. Going back to the OCD spreadsheet thing — not only is our household energy usage down 44% over a five-year period, it's at its lowest level ever (back to 1995 at least, before which there wasn't really a household to speak of). The most notable change has been in the last five years, though... not only in usage, but in price.
If you take the annual cost and divide by the annual usage, you'll see that AEP's rates for electricity have — in that same five-year period — gone up 77%. And hey, I was curious, so I did that... and here's another chart showing it:
I know times are tough and everything, and I know companies are still struggling and the economy is just barely limping along. But 77% is a pretty hefty increase. To put things in perspective, imagine gas at $6.19 per gallon, or ground beef at $3.89 a pound, or a gallon of milk costing $5.82. I'm not sure what AEP is doing to justify an increase that big — it's not like I'm now getting name-brand electricity instead of the generic stuff. It's a fundamental force of the universe... about which Michael Faraday once reportedly quipped, "One day, sir, you may tax it."
Yes indeed.