I'd occasionally toyed with the idea of starting a blog, but felt I really hadn't anything worth blogging about. Until today. I got my Ameren electric bill--ridiculously high for two people living in a two-bedroom duplex. Ridiculously high for two people who keep the thermostat at 60-62 degrees Fahrenheit. Ridiculously high for two people who keep the t.v. unplugged except when they use it, which is, perhaps once or twice a week. Ridiculously high for two people who use compact fluorescent bulbs, don't generally use ceiling lights (lamps, instead), and who generally have, at most, one small light lit in three separate rooms each, and who usually turn lights out upon exiting a room. We are careful. When we leave for a more than a day we unplug the microwave and computer, too. And in December, we were away for a week.
Yet, when I opened the Ameren bill today, it was nearly $200. $200! Perhaps to some of you this seems ridiculously low, but heed my words above. We are careful.
Sure, it's winter, and we all know that electric bills are higher in the winter (because the rates are higher in the winter . . . and, yes we uses more kilowatt hours, too). But, I was less than happy when I saw the numbers on this bill and when I reviewed the various charges.
Unsure about what all of these various charges meant, I went online to research. What I found was very interesting. The following is a letter to the editor I intended to send to the local newspaper, but I could not adequately trim the contents to 250 words and still share the pertinent information that I found important for others to read. I did email a draft to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but couldn't find word limits, so remain uncertain as to its publication status. To remedy the situation and still attempt to inform others, I began this blog.
Dear Editor:
How many of you understand your Ameren bill when it comes in the mail? How many of you have gone online or requested information only to find more corporatese that makes no sense? Having stumbled upon the “CubFacts” information sheet put out by the Citizens Utility Board for the state of Illinois (www.citizensutilityboard.org), I learned some very interesting things. First of all, the “customer charge” and “supply cost adjustment” are redundant, as are the “distribution delivery charge” and “transmission service charge.” And secondly, we are paying an “adjusted” charge under the electric supply charge and an “environmental cost recovery charge” to make up for problems that we did not create.
Okay, the customer charge, according to the CUB, takes care of general “costs of doing business,” including postage, rent and “other administrative costs” while the supply cost adjustment covers “other administrative costs associated with procuring electricity.” Why two line items for “other administrative costs”? Oh, of course, one is for office administration matters while the other addresses administrative costs incurred in “procuring electricity.”
Yet, don’t the delivery and supply charges cover “procuring electricity”? The distribution delivery charge, CUB says, covers “the costs of delivering power from the utility to your home and maintaining equipment” while the transmission service charge gets it from “the major power generator to your utility.” So, the first charge gets it from the utility to your house and the second from the generator to your utility (it’s a two-step process). And, despite the fact that the previous charge covers “maintaining equipment,” it does not cover the meter, which you may wrongly assume to be a piece of equipment. No, this is a separate charge. Oh, to be fair, it covers the cost of meter reading, which is not, oddly enough, covered under the customer charge.
Then there’s the CUBFact that informs Illinois electric users that, although the utility companies “are supposed to pass these energy costs on to customers with no markup,” Ameren charges us more than market price to cover something called “line loss,” which is the power that is lost when “traveling over the lines” due the heat it “gives off.” So, we’re paying extra for something that is either a) uncontrollable because it is the nature of energy, or b) caused in improperly insulated lines that should be maintained using the customer cost.
Just to add insult to injury, Ameren charges us an “environmental adjustment.” Now, for all of us who care about the environment this sounds like a nice thing. But, this fee is not used to keep current and future energy clean, it is used to defer Ameren’s costs for “cleaning up pollution at former gas-manufacturing sites.” So, once again, the citizen is left to pay for the messes produced by the corporations. Do we have a say in whether or not we pay to clean up the utilities’ messes? Sure we do. We can refuse to pay our bills. And what will happen? We’ll have a very cold winter.
Rebekah M. Fowler
