Like Susan I'm on a time of use meter. Like her I paid more on my last bill than I would have on a flat rate. I called BGE and was told if I wanted to save money only use the electric on off peak hours. I tried to explain to the rep. that you can only cut back so far. Then you would have to disconnect everything, you fridge, heat, all appiances and only live in your house on weekends. The reply was to save electric on the time of use meter you should only use electric during off peak time. I simply hung up.

I had the time of use meter and am glad I'm off it. Years ago, there was a big savings because the lowest rate was much lower than the highest rate. Now, the rates are almost the same. It's not worth the time and effort it takes to do laundry, cooking, cleaning, etc., during off-peak hours. I'll never go back on the time of use meter unless I'm absolutely, positively forced to do so.

Yesterday we received to bills for June & July from Ohms Energy. I notice now that BGE did not bill us for the electric portion in June & July. Do you think it is okay to pay Ohms directly---or will we get a catch-up bill from BGE?

That would make me so upset to go to all that effort for nothing. I think what is interesting about this is the lack of customer satisfaction. I recently watched an interview about the history of service and the power the internet age has given us customers.

Up until now, BG&E didn't have to make their off-peak rates attractive on their time of day billing plan, because they were able to pass the higher costs of buying peak power on to their customers who were forced to eat the cost. This had the additional damaging effect of not convincing the public to switch use to off-peak so that the generators could avoid starting up their inefficient and polluting peaking plants, some of which use horrible fossil fuels like diesel (look at utilities' distributed generation assets, where they call on their customers with emergency backup diesel generator sets to switch off the grid onto back-up power during peak usage periods and pay their commercial customers large incentives for the service, passing on the costs to their residential customers.)

So, what can you do about it? Switch providers. As a residential customer, I have been using Washington Gas & Electric, which even gives me a choice of how much renewable wind power I want to purchase.

There are even more choices for commercial customers. MGPC offers a free energy survey, part of which involves examining a commercial utility bill and finding alternatives, reducing waste.

This can be done by faxing your business's electric and gas bill (all pages) with a cover sheet containing contact information to fax: 443-927-9018.

Recently, MGPC saved a non-profit organization over $ 6,700 per month in electricity costs alone.

There are choices out there - let's vote with our dollars!

Thank you for this article! I just found it and because of it discovered that I paid $11.02 more on our last bill than we would have if we were on the standard flat rate rather than time of use plan!!! We paid $6.52 more for our energy use and $4.50 more for the customer charge. We spent $15.69 more on our previous bill!

I am extremely angry over this. I keep our house at 55-57 degrees during the day (I work from home, so I am very aware of the cold and bundle myself in layers), and we keep it at 50 degrees at night. We bump it up to 60 degrees for the first two hours of the morning so it’s easier on morning dressing. I often quip that we “pay a lot to be this miserable”.

Part of the reason we work so hard to use less energy and to use most of our energy off-peak is because it is better for the environment (that was our main motivation when we first started). Another strong motivation is our low income compared to the average American and having looming college expenses .

So, I am doing everything I can possibly think of to reduce our energy bill and carbon footprint (meanwhile helping BGE spread the demand) and then find out that I’m actually paying MORE!!

I don't think these companies believe that most people will do the work necessary to investigate what the numbers represent (I certainly didn't have enough time to fully look into this before but a decrease in my business due to the economy has freed up some of my time to be more diligent). So they can confuse us into paying more money when we think we're doing the right thing (i.e. time of use). One thing we need is a transparent smart grid to see the actual cost of running each of our devices and see how much we're racking up each day before we receive our final bill.

We need to make sure that the new Peak Rewards program is all it’s cracked up to be. We may sign up in the beginning but we will monitor the bills closely to make sure they don’t “bait and switch” us like they did with the Time of Use. If it ends up costing us more, I'll be happy to go back to the standard rate but keep up with the usual time of use schedule to help the environment (not BGE).

Feeling used and manipulated.

Nancy

A normally mild-mannered conservative person who is starting to feel like a wild-eyed radical individual fighting the nasty corporation. Give me a smart grid! Even better, I’d like to get off the grid!!