Everyone in the state of Texas is familiar, even if they don’t understand why, of the fact that their electricity bills might rise and fall from month to month depending on the time of the year. For Texans, this fact is specifically true in the summertime. But what might be curious to people is how this happens, even if a customer has a fixed rate plan and fastidiously keeps their thermostat at the same setting, month in and month out throughout the course of the year. So if this is the case, why does your electricity bill fluctuate? Well, there are many different reasons, but unquestionably, a huge factor that affects your electricity bill is the weather.
For Texans, lets start with what we’re most familiar with, which is the summertime. As I’ve said, everyone knows that our bills go up in the summer, and we know basically that this is because the summers in Texas get hotter. But why does this affect your electric bill? Well, to understand why this is, you need to wrap you head around the basic understanding of temperature and your electricity bill. For Texans, even if you keep your thermostat at 72 all year round, when it’s 100 degrees outside, suddenly your generators have to work to move the temperature down 28 degrees, when they might perhaps only have to work to move it 4 degrees from 68 to 72 in mid-October. That means that in the summer, the generators are working four times as hard to keep your apartment at a constant temperature. So the general rule is that the harder a generator has to work, the higher the cost of your electricity bill. Seems fairly simple, right?
Summer Weather and Your Electricity Bill
The same principle about electricity bills and the cost of cooling your place has other affects on the cost of your summer electricity as well. We’ve already discussed the effort it takes to keep the electricity in your home at a constant rate, and how that relates to the cost/amount of electricity you use. Well, that general idea also applies for the actual creation of electricity as well. If it takes more energy to keep your home cool in the summer, well, that extra electricity has to come from somewhere. This means that the actual generators that create the electricity for your home have to work harder (or more generators will have to be utilized) to make up for this increased need for energy. So not only are you using more electricity to get the same results, but the costs to generate the electricity for the local Transmission Distribution Service Provider (companies like ONCOR and Centerpoint) increase as well. Naturally, that increase in costs will be passed onto the Retail Electricity Provider who sells the electricity to the customer. And that increase will in a measure be passed onto the customer.
But lets reference this with a recent real world example that happened recently in the Texas electricity market. Recently, an electricity generator in Texas went offline for an extended period of time. Well, this put an extreme amount of strain on the other generators to keep up with the demand for all of the electricity customers in the state of Texas. They generators have to be run constantly. Imagine driving your car at 80 miles per hour for 24 hours straight. Eventually, something is going to happen, be it you’ll run out of gas, the car will overheat, or something inside will break. Now consider that this came at a time of peak summer heat and in the midst of an extremely brutal Texas drought, which has also been working overtime to make sure that Texas isn’t getting any kind of reprieve from the heat. So all things considered, you’re talking about a lot of factors that have been putting extreme stress on all of the generators in Texas, and one finally broke and went offline. So that’s one less generator to keep up with the same demand. So the weather and oppressive heat were a double-edged sword in this instance. The excessive drought and heat caused the generators to work overtime to keep up with the increased demand for customers to keep their homes and business cool. These two factors combined to essentially cause a generator to go offline. So before when the demand was at its peak, now there’s even one less generator helping to produce electricity and keep things cool. Ironically, this caused the price of electricity to go up even higher, which was a cost difference that had to be paid out by both the Retail Electricity Providers (REPs) like Bounce Energy, Reliant, TXU, etc. These companies who sell electricity to customers have to pay higher prices for them, and that cost is then passed onto the customers themselves. And all of this can be tied in directly to the oppressive summer weather in the state of Texas.
Continued …
Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/weather-articles/weather-and-your-electricity-bill-1317117.html#ixzz1G5xwIS9F
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