Today I received a letter from Jersey Central Power and Light (JCP&L) in support of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities regarding Governor Corzine’s Energy Master Plan to place a premium on Basic Generation Services (BGS)… lost yet?

Here’s the rub, anyone using more than 2500KWh’s of electricity per month between June and September will pay an extra $0.09 per KWh for that power… guess when my electric car arrives… June :-(

The extra charge is there to deter usage and I’m not against that, the charge represents an additional 50% (ish) extra per KWh but, I use power; I’ve done what I can to reduce it; compact fluorescents, efficient appliances, sparing use of the air conditioning and more but I still peak over that limit during those months. Now that I’ve switched my transport from Gasoline to Electricity I’m going to to be paying top dollar + premium for it. I’m not very happy about that.

Let’s do the numbers:

My Tesla Roadster will cost me about 200KWh’s of power a month, or about $42 in today's money but add on the peek usage charge and we’re up to $58… Looks like a tank of gasoline at that sort of money. Ok, so it’s still twice the fuel costs of a comparable car but, still; don’t penalize me!

I’m a big fan of using electricity; when we first came over to the US at the turn of the century, in our run-down fixer-upper our only source of warmth was a small electric toaster oven with the door propped open. That said, excepting those times when a bit of toast got stuck on the element is was totally non-polluting and that’s the draw of electricity.

I briefly heated my whole house on electricity (that’s not totally crazy… a lot of metal gets smelted by electric power) before switching to gas. A change that I’m not entirely comfortable with; after all, would you enjoy sitting next to the exhaust from the house furnace?

Electricity; it’s non-polluting for the consumer, we should use it where and when we can in preference to gas and coal… let the power companies with their high-tech furnaces get the best from fossil fuels and give us ‘Switchers’ a break.

MPT