This much higher electric bill often is not just about a hot summer month where the air conditioner is running more than it normally would. There could be a combination of things going on. I would consider your number one problem ELECTRICAL DEFECTS.

The Electrical Defect

The Electric Water Heater

These high energy bills come from things such as a leaking electric hot water heater. Just like a leaking water line can cause you to get a $500 water bill a leaking electric water heater can cause a $500 electricity bill. Having this issue is similar to you just leaving your hot water faucet running 24/7. This is not a good thing at all and will run through your money quick.

Pool Pump Timer Defect

The pull pump timer sometimes goes bad or must be reset. The pool pump uses a ton of electricity and contributes the most to the yearly maintenance cost of your swimming pool. If this little contraption gets electrically messed up you will pay in higher electricity bill charges. These pumps normally run for just a small portion of the day but leaving it on 24/7 will take a bite out of your wallet.

Heat Pump Performing Poorly

A heat pump is supposed to perform at the correct temperature split. If the temperature split gets out of whack it just means there are some service maintenance aspects of your air conditioning system that need to be checked by a yearly A/C maintenance plan. Twice as much electricity as you normally use can occur if this temperature split is too out of alignment.

Thermostat Set to Emergency Heat

There is a setting on modern thermostats that reads Emergency Heat or something abbreviated in a similar spelling. If this setting is on your winter electricity bill will be twice as high as normal.

Current Leakage

You could have a short circuit at your breaker with a low voltage flow. This type of leakage can be difficult to narrow down and so an electrician is recommended if you believe you have a current leakage of some kind. To troubleshoot you would turn off all breakers, unplug all appliances in the house. Turn the breaker back on and if you register any current flow there could be a leakage occurring but an electrician would be able to tell you for sure. There are certain things in the house to throw this off such as lights on electrical outlets and other tricky things that an electrician could handle easier than the homeowner.

Don’t Forget to Shop for Cheaper Electricity Prices

Hopefully, these ideas give you some places to look for ways to stop absurd electricity bills from ruining your family vacation budget. Be sure to use our website to find an affordable electric rate pulled from multiple Texas electric companies in a detailed electricity comparison. Type your zipcode above to get started.

I came over to her house and we went through the providers looking for one that would save her more money. Each provider would ask for a deposit even though she had good credit and had been paying her bill on time every month. It didn’t make much sense because she was an excellent customer, why is there a deposit?

The deposit requirements have more to do with trade secrets the electric companies keep close to the chest than whether you are a good honest paying customer. The finer details on why each provider asked for a deposit is something that I could not make clear because the providers are not clear on this either.

What she had going for her is that she had paid her electric bill on time each month and was in good standing with her current electric company. The rates to renew with her current provider weren’t too bad in comparison with the providers we looked at when shopping. I told her if she renews with her current provider she will not be asked for a deposit because she is in good standing with them.

My friend only had $600 in savings in her bank and so taking $200 out of that account to pay an electric deposit just didn’t make sense for her situation. By renewing with her current provider she kept a good buffer in her savings account and still saved money. The renewal rate was not enough difference in cost to make much difference compared to going with someone different.

For those in a low income situation just starting out, you may have to initially pay a deposit with a traditional electric company. Keep in mind though after 6 months to a year the electric company will no longer ask you for a deposit if you renew with them. Showing you are a good paying customer with an electric company will help guarantee that provider will be more lenient in not asking you for a deposit in the future.

There are also “no deposit electric companies” but these companies aren’t always the cheapest. It pays to consider what it means for someone in a low income situation to sign up with a regular electric company that checks credit. They initially will ask for a deposit, but future years provided you are a good customer will show that they will waive future deposits.

Two climate scientists skeptical of man-made global warming are closely watching a study they say could be a “death knell” to climate alarmism.

A major scientific study conducted at the University of Reading on the interactions between aerosols and clouds is much weaker than most climate models assume, meaning the planet could warm way less than predicted.

“Currently, details are few, but apparently the results of a major scientific study on the effects of anthropogenic aerosols on clouds are going to have large implications for climate change projections—substantially lowering future temperature rise expectations,” Cato Institute climate scientists Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger wrote in a recent blog post.

Michaels and Knappenberger, both self-described “lukewarmers,” cited a blog post by Reading scientist Dr. Nicolas Bellouin on the preliminary results of his extensive research into this rather vague area of climate science.

Bellouin wrote “there are reasons to expect that aerosol-cloud interactions are weaker than simulated by climate models – and perhaps even weaker than the preliminary… estimate.”

If Bellouin’s preliminary results hold (or are revised downward), that would mean there’s less of a cooling effect from human-created aerosols interacting with clouds, which morph clouds so they bounce incoming solar energy back into space.

“It may be that aerosol-cloud interactions are lost in the noise of natural variability in cloud properties, but for such a large perturbation, the impacts are surprisingly hard to isolate,” Bellouin wrote.

For decades, scientists assumed aerosols — mostly emitted from coal plants, shipping, car travel and other industrial sources — had a sizable cooling effect on the planet, but that might not be the case. More importantly, however, is the fact that if aerosols don’t have much of a cooling effect, the planet is not as sensitive to increases in greenhouse gas emissions. That means less warming.

“Less enhanced cloud cooling means that greenhouse gases have produced less warming than the climate models have determined,” Michaels and Knappenberger wrote.

“Another way to put it is that this new finding implies that the earth’s climate sensitivity—how much the earth’s surface will warm from a doubling of the pre-industrial atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration—is much below that of the average climate model (3.2°C) and near the low end of the IPCC’s 1.5°C to 4.5°C assessed range,” they added.

Michaels and Knappenberger are particularly interested in Bellouin’s work since it seems to support a study from last year by Bjorn Stevens, a scientist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. It found aerosols had much less of a cooling effect on the planet than assumed by climate models.

Stevens’s study suggested “that aerosol radiative forcing is less negative and more certain than is commonly believed.”

Independent climate researcher Nick Lewis incorporated Stevens’s findings with his own on how much warming people could expect from doubling atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Lewis found the upper bound estimate of climate sensitivity is from 4.5 degrees to 1.8 degrees Celsius.

In layman’s terms, doubling atmospheric concentrations of CO2 from around 400 parts per million today to 800 ppm in the future would cause 4.5 degrees Celsius of warming, based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate model data.

Incorporate the Max Planck study results, and warming would only be as high as 1.8 degrees Celsius — less than half of what IPCC originally predicted.

Of course, Michaels and Knappenberger’s theory is not accepted by everybody. Stevens himself challenged their suggestion that climate sensitivity was lower because aerosols had less of a cooling effect on the planet.

“As they stand, the results of this new study seem to confirm the results of an analysis published last year by Bjorn Stevens of the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology which also showed a much smaller anthropogenic enhancement of the cooling property of clouds,” Michaels and Knappenberger wrote.

Stevens is entitled to his own opinion, not his own results. And now it seems his research is being supported by Bellouin’s work. With less aerosol cooling, climate models could be tweaked to predict less future warming.

“In the end, aerosol-cloud scientists reckon that it will come down to counting how often clouds happen to show strong sensitivity to aerosol perturbations,” Bellouin wrote. “Those discussions leave me with the feeling that such situations occur infrequently, and radiative forcing of aerosol-cloud interactions may need to be revised down to weaker values.”

If there were a specific time of year when rates were lower you could make a fortune in the energy commodities market.

You could trade on the Chicago exchange each year and make a good living knowing when energy would be lower and you would never have to work again.

In reality seasonal weather changes, energy shortages, summer demand spikes are all built into the price of energy already.

For prices to go higher or lower in the summer you would need an abnormality in the weather or supply of energy to occur.

These abnormalities in supply and weather is what you would need to predict in order to price electricity prices correctly each year and come out with the cheapest price of the year annually.

Since nobody can accurately do this consistently this has a lot to do with why there are not thousands of professional energy traders becoming millionaires right now.

Also since you and I cannot do this we also can’t predict electricity prices being lower in the winter or the summer.

In reality your guess is a 50/50 crap shoot each and every time you lock in your electricity price for the year and hope you locked in while prices were near their bottoms and not their tops.

What you can do as a consumer is compare prices using a widget like the one we provide on our website. You enter your zip code and click compare and a list of providers and rates will appear.

Find a good cheap rate and lock in for a year and hope because that’s all you really can do, that prices in the markets are currently near their lows.

A good tip is if prices look relatively low to you or something affordable than that is a likely indicator that locking in for a year might not be a bad idea.

Reading from the PUC website you can read for yourself similar language as I have described.

“Transmission and Distribution Utilities (TDUs) must offer access to their wires to all REPs on a non-discriminatory basis under standard terms and conditions adopted by the Commission.”

“These areas are open to full retail competition as of January 1, 2002, and these TDUs charge the below rates to REPs.”

To see the rates in the Oncor area of Texas click here

The reason this topic has been brought up on this blog is due to the large amount of sales people out there that use the TDSP part of the bill to confuse customers about their rate in order to get them to switch providers.

You may hear from a retail electric provider sales person that their company does not charge the TDSP charge or that it is much lower than another provider.

Statements like the one above are lies and deceptions geared to getting you to believe a given rate from a new provider is cheaper than the one you have.

There are cheaper providers out there so shopping around is a good thing. When the cheaper rate being discussed is only cheaper because they argue regarding the TDSP part of the rate then take notice because you are about to be had.

Where this deception is most often encountered is through door to door sales people, responding to a newspaper ad in a thrift paper by calling number on ad, or via MLM sales people that may be regurgitating information they themselves do not fully understand.

However you heard about a cheaper rate by getting a lower TDSP charge this is very false information and by no means believe it. These people are either lieing or they have been led to believe something false and are now sending you down their gullible road.

In summary this article was written to help those navigate down a typical issue encountered when choosing an electric rate. If you have further questions please call or use our compare widget.

Most people get their highest electric bill after they let their contract expire and the rate defaults to a variable market rate.

The variable prices are not hedged rates and so the provider is taking on a significant risk by selling a price that is not locked in.

The provider can eliminate this risk by adding in their profit margin and allowing the price increase that may happen to roll over to the customer.

Market electric rates can sometimes be lower than what you could sign up on with a fixed rate but an electric provider is unlikely to give you these savings if you did not renew your contract.

What they will do instead is give themselves an added 2 cents or more per kWh added to the existing profit margin.

So you may have had a significantly cheaper electric bill over past years while on a 1 year fixed contract.

Your electric bill might have been under $100 a month but as soon as that contract expired your rate went to a variable price and you racked up almost 2 months of usage on a higher electric rate and perhaps had a $200 plus electric bill for the two months you were off contract.

An electric provider that gave you an excellent deal in the beginning may have hoped a certain percentage of their customers would allow their contract to lapse so they could meet their profit target.

This is a warning to procrastinators. Don’t let your electric service contract expire without renewing with the same provider or shopping and ordering with a cheaper provider.

The providers would hope you will let it slide but it’s not a smart move for a family budget that needs to stay on target.

In summary, let me suggest a way to avoid the electric rate price uptick by setting an alarm to ring on your phone around the date of your contract expiration. Make a committment to shop and order electric service when that alarm sounds so you don’t pay $200 – $400 more for electricity than you really needed to.

Essay by Paul Driessen

The Middle East is imploding. Islamic State butchers are annihilating Christian and other communities. Putin is sending arms to Assad. Under the Obama-Iran nuclear deal, the mullahs will get $100+ billion to expand their proxy terror war on Israel and the West. Saudi Arabia has 100,000 empty air-conditioned tents but won’t take any of the millions who’ve been driven from their homes. Neither will most of the other 22 Arab League nations or 57 Organization of Islamic Cooperation member countries.

Instead, millions of mostly Muslim migrants, militants and refugees are heading to Europe – with limited money, education, job skills, or desire to assimilate. They demand entry into EU countries whose energy, economic, employment and welfare systems are already foundering or nearing collapse.

EU nations have hobbled their nuclear and carbon-based energy systems so completely that unsubsidized German and Danish electricity prices are almost ten times higher than in US states that still rely on coal-fired generation. Industrial giant Siemens is cutting 1,600 jobs in its power and gas division, companies are hard-pressed to compete internationally, and 0.5% annual economic growth is deemed “robust.”

So naturally, President Obama, Pope Francis, the European Commission, United Nations, and many poor countries are obsessed with – climate change! It’s insanity on steroids. The alarmist assertions are absurd.

“Climate change is already disrupting our agriculture and ecosystems, our water and food supplies,” Obama recently inveighed. “If we do nothing, Alaskan temperatures are projected to rise between six and twelve degrees by the end of the century.”

Read more: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/21/climate-insanity-on-steroids/

Source: Blackjay

The Enlightenment
The development of modern science in the late 18th century went hand in hand with the rise of modern industrial capitalism. Its potteries, mines, steam engines, mechanization, and science itself, were all done by private enterprise. The role of government was to enforce patents and maintain a healthy legal and commercial environment.

Nowadays most scientists are paid by the government. What passes for science has largely become taxpayer-funded Environmentalism. Environmentalism has taken over much of science.

Scientists discover, understand and inform.

Environmentalists preach.

Quote

“All of us … are borrowing against this Earth in the name of economic growth, accumulating an environmental debt by burning fossil fuels, the consequences of which will be left for our children and grandchildren to bear.” Marcia McNutt – Chief Editor, Science Magazine.

This is preaching. There is no scientific justification for this statement, which was made by the editor of one of the world’s most prestigious science journals. It is a statement of militant Environmentalism, pure and simple. To say that she should have known better is to misunderstand the situation. It would be like saying that the Communists, who controlled big chunks of the Australian trade union movement in the 1950s, “should have known better”. Environmentalists are way ahead of those old Communists; their “Long March through the Institutions” is now a fait accompli.

It works like this: activists use science to push for international action on a science-related issue in an area such as health or environment. Then, an international agreement is established, and the science on which it is has been based becomes institutionalized and funded by government. Time and again, when this happens, “the science” stops being science. This is because the scientists working on the relevant topic start being advocates and stop being researchers. After all, they are now being paid by the bureaucracy to support a particular doctrine, not to discover new stuff.

Real science, which requires a sceptical and innovative frame of mind, then withers on the vine.

Here are some examples:

Radiation Health
In 2012 I received 7000 milli-Sieverts of radiation as treatment for prostate cancer. I found out from the Web that this is twice the fatal dose! I became curious about how I came to survive this assault and I discovered that radiation administered in moderate doses is not cumulative and is not especially harmful. In my case it was definitely beneficial.

But the International Committee for Radiological Protection says otherwise . They say radiation effects are always cumulative and that there is no safe dose: see here about Wade Allison‘s book, Radiation and Reason.

But you can’t be too careful, I hear you say. Well, yes you certainly can be too careful. The Japanese government was too careful when it forcibly relocated 100,000 people following the Fukushima meltdown.

The facts:

Number of deaths: about 1600 people.
Cause of deaths: Suicide mainly.
Number of cases of radiation sickness: 3 people.
Number of deaths caused by radiation: none!
The suicides arose from the social dislocation which occurred when people were compelled to leave their homes and their farms and their jobs and their schools to be relocated to the other side of Japan for reasons of political correctness.

The 1968 London Convention on Ocean Dumping
This forbids the disposal of poisons such as heavy metals in the deep ocean. Hydrothermal vents were discovered in 1977, 9 years after the convention took place. Also known as “black smokers”, they lie on mid-ocean ridges and above volcanic hotspots, 2 to 3 kilometres below the surface of the ocean. Every year they pump into the ocean:

500 tonnes of Arsenic,
1500 tonnes of Lead,
50,000 tonnes of Copper,
140,000 tonnes of Zinc and
many other metals including Uranium and its radioactive daughters.
This has been going on for, perhaps, a billion years or so.

Nature is the biggest polluter of the ocean and the London Convention is a joke. In fact it is worse than a joke because it precludes sensible, practical solutions to important environmental problems. For example, without it we could dispose of radioactive waste in deep ocean trenches where it would be out of harm’s way until it is ultimately subducted under the earth’s crust by geological processes.

Climate Change
The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the most egregious example of this science-destroying institutionalization. It is all the more virulent because it feeds into the pre-existing mindset of Left and Green ideologies about “Corporate Greed” and “Mankind wrecking the planet”.

Billions of dollars are being pumped into this. Tens of thousands of climate modellers, their technicians and their computer jocks are the self-righteous recipients. They are not going to give up their funding easily – for them this is the greatest thing since sliced bread and, what is worse, most of them sincerely believe that they are saving the planet.

Over the last 30 years, Climate Science, once a forgotten little wallflower, has become a rock star.

There is really no solid evidence that human activities affect global climate. It is only a theory. Computer models based on this theory have no predictive power; they are complicated curve-fitting exercises and, like all such curve-fitting exercise, they fail catastrophically outside the range of the fit.

On the other hand there is ample evidence that so-called “greenhouse gases” do not affect global temperature to any observable degree (see my UNFCCC Submission to the Federal Government for more detail), viz.:

The observation that the amount of industrial CO2 added to the ocean-atmosphere system since the beginning of the industrial revolution, about 400 Gigatons, is only a tiny fraction of the total amount in the system, 32,000 Gigatons.

The observed rate of decrease in temperature with height, the adiabatic lapse rate, is measured many times a day throughout the world by weather balloons and it fits a simple convective heat transport model of the lower atmosphere. It does not fit a simple radiative heat transport model; there is no blanket of CO2 “holding the heat in”.

Careful comparisons of small changes in global average temperature with variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration indicate that the latter lags the former by about ten months indicating that temperature increases cause CO2 increases and not the other way around.

The global distribution of atmospheric CO2 concentration recently observed by NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory does not support the view that increases in this gas are largely due to Western industrial activity. Rather, the gas appears to emanate from the rice paddies and rain-forests of the Third World (see here and here).

The observation that global average temperature has a variance spectrum which is “red” at every time scale from one year to 100,000 years (i.e. the longer the time scale the bigger the variation). The small variations (~0.8°C) which occurred during the 20th Century are only to be expected. They are random walk excursions. There is nothing to explain. Climate science is like picking patterns in TattsLotto numbers. Meteorologists can predict the weather up to about a week ahead. That’s as good as it gets.

But if you are a scientist who is part of the climate change institution this evidence is all irrelevant. The “Science of Climate Change” was frozen sometime back in the 1990s when the IPCC was first set up. Nowadays it is just a matter of running ever more complex computer simulations and making more “projections” of future climate and its alarming consequences.

And, of course, re-jigging the data so that it fits the models better.

We often hear it said that “97 percent of climate scientists agree …” and so on

Well they would, wouldn’t they.

About the author: I have a PhD in Upper Atmosphere Physics from the University of Tasmania. I have worked for the Australian Antarctic Division and CSIRO in auroral physics, ocean waves and fluid dynamic modelling.

I am a scientist – I discover things. I discovered cosmic noise absorption pulsations and I discovered the physics underlying the frequency down-shifting of surface gravity waves. I am presently working on a method for distinguishing between cyclical behaviour and random walk excursions in natural time series.

Be sure to visit the source of this article and comment if you would like here: Blackjay.net

A recent survey by Rasmussen Reports reveals that 2/3 Americans are unwilling to pay even $100 / annum additional costs to prevent global warming.

According to Rasmussen;

Most voters still aren’t ready to pay much, if anything, to fight global warming, but a slightly higher number are willing to spend more for the cause.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 41% of Likely U.S. Voters say they are willing to pay nothing more in higher taxes and utility costs annually to to generate cleaner energy and fight global warming. But that’s down from 48% last August and the lowest level measured in regular tracking since January 2013. Another 24% are willing to spend only $100 more per year, unchanged from earlier surveys. Twenty-six percent (26%) are ready to spend $300 or more a year to combat global warming, with six percent (6%) who are ready to spend at least $1,000 more annually. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Read more: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environment_energy/are_voters_willing_to_pay_to_combat_global_warming

Intriguingly, a lot of people questioned by Rasmussen think global warming is primarily caused by human activity.

Read more: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environment_energy/environment_update

To me this suggests 3 possibilities:

Many of the people who are concerned about the climate, don’t think paying more tax will help to cool the planet.
A lot of people who say they are concerned don’t really mean it.
A combination of the above.
However there is good news for people concerned about climate change. If the 26% of Americans willing to spend $300 / annum, and the 6% of Americans willing to spend $1000 / annum, really mean what they say:

26% x 300 million people x $300 + 6% x 300 million people x $1000
= $23 billion + $18 billion
= $41 billion / annum

$41 billion / annum is just under half of what rich countries promised to pay at Copenhagen 2009.

So my good news is, America’s fair share of the $100 billion rich country tithe can be amply covered by the voluntary pledges of people who say they are willing to pay to save the planet – no need to levy taxes on anyone.

Those who believe now have a real opportunity to make a personal difference. Furthermore, I’m happy to volunteer to help coordinate the effort, you can send your cash c/o WUWT. In the next decade it will become more than obvious how effective my secret $410 billion plan to prevent global warming has been – at least it will be, until NOAA revises their figures again.

Source: From wattsupwiththat.com blog –

“Don’t these sound like the predictions today that fail, like the 50 million climate refugees by 2010 followed by the moving of the goalposts to 2020?”

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

and this classic:

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist