In 2009, with the approval of the PUCO, FirstEnergy reorganized and consolidated its rate schedules. As part of this change, the favorable all-electric rate schedule was eliminated. One concession was that homes that had the all-electric rate now receive a special delivery discount of 1.7 cents per kilowatt hour during the nine “winter” months. Nevertheless, owners of all-electric homes are seeing their average costs per kilowatt hour more than double (from 5.1 cents to 11.7 cents per kilowatt hour). Other residential customers have seen increases of about 70% (from 7.7 cents to 13.4 cents per kilowatt hour).
In the Plain Dealer on Saturday, February 13th, John Funk provided an update on attempts to get relief for owners of all-electric homes. See the link below for more information.
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2010/02/firstenergy_told_to_fix_proble.html
In any event, we recommend shopping for generation with alternative suppliers and considering ways to reduce electric consumption. Watch for future posts in which we will show two detailed real-life examples of ways to reduce residential energy consumption by 40% or more.
