New Jersey residents’ electricity bills will chill out in June just as the weather begins to heat up.

The state Board of Public Utilities on Thursday approved the results of the state’s annual electricity auction. It sets the wholesale electricity prices that the state’s electric utilities will pay and pass through to all New Jersey residential customers. It does not increase or decrease a utility’s profits.

As of June 1, average Jersey Central Power & Light ratepayers using 650 kilowatt hours a month will see their monthly bills decrease to $101.49, down $6.96, or 6.4 percent; Atlantic City Electric customers will see their average rates drop $3.35, or 2.84 percent, to $114.65; and Public Service Electric & Gas customers will see their average rates decrease $4.41, or 3.6 percent, to $116.99.

The auction resulted in “significant drops in costs to ratepayers,” said Robert M. Hanna, BPU president.

The state’s 11th annual electricity auction ran from Feb. 3 to Tuesday. An auction to supply large commercial and industrial customers ran from Feb. 2 to Feb. 3.

The results – contracts that run for three years and which cover one-third of the state’s annual electricity supply – was 19.8 percent lower than the average they replaced from the 2009 auction. “We are very confident about the process that it led to fairly pure price competition,” Hanna said.

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NEW YORK—Duke Energy Corp.’s fourth quarter earnings fell 33 percent as mild temperatures reduced the demand for electricity while tumultuous weather increased the costs of storm repairs.

On Thursday, Duke said it earned $288 million, or 22 cents per share, in the fourth quarter, down from $427 million, or 32 cents per share, in the last quarter of 2010. Duke’s earnings, adjusted to remove the effects of special items, rose 14 percent to 24 cents per share. Revenue was $3.37 billion, down from $3.46 billion.

Analysts polled by FactSet expected earnings of 21 cents per share on revenue of $3.36 billion

Results were helped by strong performance in Duke’s international operations. The company operates hydro-electric power plants in Brazil. Heavy rains increased output from the plants and the company renewed and renegotiated power contracts at higher prices.

“It shows the benefit of having a portfolio of assets,” said Duke CEO Jim Rogers in an interview.

Duke, which is based in Charlotte, N.C., serves 4 million electric and gas customers in the Carolinas, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio. Temperatures in the fall and early winter were mild across much of the nation, reducing demand for electricity for heating. At the same time, maintenance costs rose as a result of storm damage, including from an unusual storm that hit the eastern seaboard in late October.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_19977859

By John Funk, The Plain Dealer

For a decade, Cleveland Heights homeowners Cynthia and Christopher Trotta have unknowingly heated the attic of their 86-year-old home.

It took a home energy audit from Dominion East Ohio gas company to locate a long-forgotten “chase” in the corner of a basement ceiling.

Common in frame homes older cities and suburbs, the chase is just a chute that runs from the basement to the attic.

Electricians trying to rewire an old house are happy to find a chase because it makes re-wiring the second floor a lot easier.

Fire departments abhor them because chases makes it easy for a fire to leap into the attic and roof. Or, as it happens, warm air of any kind.

When a team of Good Cents energy auditors contracted by Dominion did the first air infiltration pressure test on the Trotta’s home, they were surprised.

“They said the house had about three times the air flow as it should have,” said Cynthia Trotta. “Even our fireplace was not that much of an issue.”

A check of the usual suspects — air leaks around windows and doors, and at the “sill plate” between the top of the basement wall and the frame house — didn’t account for the tremendous leak.

“They discovered a chase in the basement corner,” she said, adding that no one had ever mentioned its existence.

Sealing the chase will be easy, and inexpensive.

“Without this test we might have done windows first, or attic insulation,” said Trotta. “Now we have a game plan.”

The audit found that closing the chase and other much smaller air leaks throughout the home would save the family $418 per year at current gas prices — more than the $301 a new furnace would save in heating costs.

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Several flexible submetering systems are available for different utility applications. Each system is designed for a specific application. Utility submetering makes the people become aware of their consumption methods and thus are the most effective way to determine the use of energies through accurate billing systems. Usage of essential utilities like electricity, gas, water, etc can be monitored by submeters through any of the latest medium of communication. This process will be of much use to large facilities and companies as the whole facilitys consumption of utilities will be gathered to a single location and exact data will be recorded for individual units with respect to the usage of utilities.

multifamily utility Company serves the clients by providing several services in Utility submetering, management and conservation including installation and maintenance of utility submetering and offers you monthly accurate billing with reports. Building owners and residents can have economic benefits and is safe for the environment as submetering helps in conservation. multifamily utility submetering also helps the individuals reduce utility costs in their units by suggesting them simple conservation tips through various programs conducted by them. Payment of bills is made simple and the consumers have the option to check and view their accounts online.

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INTRODUCTION
Utility bill tracking and analysis is at the center of rigorous energy management practice.  Reliable energy management decisions can be made based upon analysis from an effective utility bill tracking system.  From your utility bills you can determine:

-    whether you are saving energy or increasing your consumption,
-    which buildings are using too much energy,
-    whether your energy management efforts are succeeding,
-    whether there are utility billing or metering errors, and
-    when usage or metering anomalies occur (ie. when usage patterns change)   

Any energy management program is incomplete if it does not track utility bills. Equally, any energy management program is rendered less effective when its utility tracking system is difficult to use or does not yield valuable information. In either case, fruitful energy savings opportunities are lost.

Many practical energy managers make the smart choice and invest in utility bill tracking software, but then fail to recover their initial investment in energy savings opportunities.  How could this be?  

This paper introduces three simple and useful procedures that can be performed with utility bill tracking software.  Just performing and acting upon the first two types of analysis will likely save you enough money to pay for your utility bill tracking system in the first year.  The three topics are Benchmarking, Load Factor Analysis, and Weather Normalization as shown in Table 1.

BENCHMARKING
Let’s suppose you were the new energy manager in charge of a portfolio of school buildings for a district.  Due to a lack of resources, you cannot devote your attention to all the schools at the same time.  You must select a handful of schools to overhaul.  To identify those schools most in need of your attention, one of the first things you might do is find out which schools were using too much energy.  A simple comparison of Total Annual Utility Costs spent would identify those buildings that spend the most on energy, but not why.  

As seen in Figure 1, Santa Rosa Elementary School (ES), San Simeon ES and San Gabriel ES cost the most to operate, while San Luis Obispo ES and Creston ES cost the least.  But these three schools may not be the best schools to work on first.  Most likely the buildings that spend the most on energy are the largest buildings in the portfolio.  It would be wiser to find those buildings that spend the most per square foot per year. This process is referred to as benchmarking, and is presented in Figure 2.  

Figure 2 shows the same schools, but the costs are divided by square footage (SQFT).  Santa Rosa and San Simeon ES are still the best targets, but San Gabriel ES is actually one of the more efficient schools.  Instead San Luis Obispo ES is the third most wasteful school on a $/SQFT basis. From this, we can also see that the most inefficient schools cost about 30% more to operate than the most efficient schools.

Benchmarking Different Categories of Buildings
When benchmarking, it is also useful to only compare similar facilities.  For example, if you looked at a school district and compared all buildings by $/SQFT, you might find that the technology centers administration buildings were at the top of the list, since administration buildings and technology centers often have more computers and  are more energy intensive than elementary schools and preschools. These results are expected and not necessarily useful. For this reason, it might be wise to break your buildings into categories, and then benchmark just one category at a time.

Different Datasets
You can benchmark your buildings against each other (as we did in our example) or against publicly available databases of similar buildings in your area.  Energy Star’s Portfolio Manager allows you to compare your buildings against others in your region.  Perhaps those buildings in your portfolios that looked the most wasteful are still in the top 50th percentile of all similar buildings in your area.   This would be useful to know.

Occasionally, management decides that their organization needs to save some arbitrary percentage (5%, 10%, etc.) on utility costs each year.  Depending upon the goal, this can be quite challenging, if not impossible.  Energy managers can use benchmarking to guide management in setting realistic energy management goals, as shown in Figure 3.  For example, our school district energy manager might decide to create a goal that the three most energy consuming schools use only $0.80/SQFT. Since this is about as much as the lowest energy consuming schools are currently using, this could be an attainable goal.

If you can find a dataset, you may also be able to benchmark your buildings against a set of similar buildings in your area and see the range of possibilities for your buildings.  In any case, benchmarking will focus your energy management efforts and provide realistic goals for the future.

Rules of Thumb
New energy managers often search for a “rule of thumb” to use for benchmarking.  An example could be: “If your building uses more than $2/SQFT/Year then you have a problem.”   Unfortunately, this won’t work.  Different types of buildings have different energy intensities.  Moreover, different building locations will require differing amounts of energy for heating and cooling.  In San Francisco, where temperatures are consistently in the 60s, there is almost no cooling requirement for many building types; whereas in Miami, buildings will almost always require cooling. Different building types, with their characteristic energy intensities, different weather sites, and different utility rates all combine to make it hard to have rules of thumb for benchmarking.  However, energy managers whose portfolios are all close by, can develop their own rules of thumb.  These rules will most likely not be transferable to other energy managers in different locations, with different building types, or using different utility configurations.

Benchmarking Buildings in Different Locations
There are some complications associated with benchmarking.  Suppose you were the energy manager of a chain store, and you had buildings in different national locations.  Then benchmarking might not be useful in the same sense.  Would it be fair to compare a San Diego store to a Chicago store, when it is always the right temperature outside in San Diego, and always too hot or too cold in Chicago? The Chicago store will constantly be heating or cooling, while the San Diego store might not have many heating or cooling needs.  Comparing at $/SQFT might help decide which store locations are most expensive to operate due to high utility rates and different heating and cooling needs.

Some energy analysts benchmark using kBtu/SQFT to remove the effect of utility rates (replacing $ with kBtu).  Some will take it a step further using kBtu/SQFT/HDD  to remove the effect of weather (adding HDD), but adding HDD (or CDD) is not a fair measurement, as it assumes that all usage is associated with heating. This measurement also does not take into account cooling (or heating) needs.  Many thoughtful energy managers shy away from benchmarking that involves CDD or HDD.

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By Tim Knauss / The Post-Standard The Post-Standard

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — National Grid said today that it will request another electric rate hike in Upstate New York in early 2012. If granted, the increase would take effect in 2013.

The statement came as the company released its annual financial results, which showed profits up by 25 percent from the year before.

State regulators in January approved a $119 million rate increase for the utility’s Upstate business, less than one-third of the $361 million National Grid requested. Company officials warned at the time that the hike was inadequate.

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The Illinois House approved a plan Monday to upgrade the state’s power grid that would also result in higher electric bills.

Long negotiations resulted in various changes to the measure as time has gone on, but one thing is for sure: Commonwealth Edison customers and a majority of those served by Ameren will pay more. The utilities estimate customers will pay about $3 a month more, with the promise of eventual savings down the road.

The money would be used to improve infrastructure and help create a “smart grid,” which is touted as a more efficient system. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, D-Orland Park, said it’s an idea whose time has come.

“This is the time to make sure our state is in a position to attract jobs of the future and have a grid ready to accept the inventions we know are on the way,” McCarthy said.

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Peco Energy Co.’s commercial customers who have not shopped for an alternative electric supplier might want to reconsider that strategy.

The Philadelphia utility announced Tuesday that its electricity prices for commercial customers would increase between 9.4 percent and 12.6 percent on July 1.

Peco’s commodity charge, which accounts for about two-thirds of a typical customer’s bill, will increase sharply to reflect the higher price of procuring power during the summer months, said Cathy Engel Menendez, the utility’s spokeswoman.

The increase won’t affect the 60,000 Peco small commercial customers who have switched electrical suppliers in Pennsylvania’s deregulated energy markets.

But nearly 100,000 shop owners, office managers, and manufacturers that have not switched from Peco might take a second look at alternatives in the face of the impending increase.

For small commercial customers, Peco’s price to compare will increase from 9.43 cents per kilowatt hour to 10.32 cents on July 1, a 9.4 percent increase.

For medium commercial customers, the rate will increase from 9.30 cents per kWh to 10.47 cents, or 12.6 percent.

According to Peco, the average monthly usage for general-service commercial customers – the GS Rate – is 4,530 kilowatt-hours, or about $565 a month.

A typical small business customer will see a monthly increase of $40 on July 1.

Peco had previously announced that residential charges would be increasing by 4.3 percent on July 1. On Tuesday, Peco was more specific, saying its residential price-to-compare will increase from 9.99 cents to 10.42 cents. For consumption above 500 kilowatt-hours, the price will be 11.69 cents per kWh.

Peco says that the commodity prices are based on procurement contracts with power generators, and that the utility passes the cost along to customers without markup. The supply contracts are based upon tightly structured market-based auctions.

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PPL Electric Utilities customers live in a topsy-turvy world.

The Allentown utility on Friday announced new quarterly supply rates for its customers, including an increase of more than 64 percent for customers who signed up for hourly time-of-use rates.

The rates of small commercial customers will increase 33 percent on June 1.

But most residential customers – nearly 900,000 of the utility’s 1.4 million customers – will see a 5 percent decrease.

The rate adjustments do not affect about 38 percent of PPL customers who have switched to alternative suppliers in the utility’s deregulated marketplace.

PPL spokesman Michael O. Wood said the 21,000 customers who switched to hourly rates this year can switch back to the utility’s flat default rate immediately. He said most were expected to switch.

In Pennsylvania’s deregulated marketplace, utilities must adjust their supply rates quarterly to reflect fluctuations in the electric commodity markets. The utilities pass the costs along to customers without markup.

The quarterly changes do not affect the utility’s distribution charge, which all customers pay no matter who supplies their power.

More than 538,000 of PPL’s 1.4 million customers have switched suppliers since the market rates took hold 17 months ago, a year ahead of Peco Energy Co.’s rates.

The most severely affected customers will be those who opted for PPL’s new two-tiered time-of-use rates, which charge a higher price during peak hours, between 1 and 6 p.m. on weekdays.

Customers who signed up for those rates, which were steeply discounted during the winter, were warned they would likely increase in the summer. Now comes the rate shock.

The price for on-peak hours will increase 64 percent, from 7.54 cents per kilowatt hour to 12.37 cents.

The price for off-peak hours will increase 75 percent, from 6.1 cents per kilowatt hour to 10.65 cents.

The new price to compare for PPL’s 900,000 residential customers who have stayed with the utility will be 8.77 cents per kilowatt hour, a decrease from the current 9.27 cents per kWh. A typical residential customer using 1,000 kWh monthly will save about $5.

Wood said the dramatic difference in prices was the result of the different way the Public Utility Commission requires the utility to procure power.

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