By Steve Milloy ——Bio and Archives--July 24, 2009
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Dana and Mark Bryan of Louisville, KY stated the appliances also have led to changes in their energy using habits. “It’s helped me get more organized,” says Dana. “I now unload the dishwasher first thing in the morning and then fill it throughout the day. After dinner, I set it to run and the smart programming delays it until after 10 p.m.” Mark reports a 20% reduction of total electrical consumption in the months he has participated in the program. “As part of the pilot, I have an in-home energy monitor. It lets me know the rate I am paying and the instantaneous electrical consumption. Watching that meter has driven behavior changes in my house that have resulted in reduced energy consumption. That explains a portion of the 20% reduction.”So how much of your time at home do you really want to spend monitoring your family’s electricity usage? The average monthly electric bill in the U.S. is about $100. If obsessing over the in-home energy monitor saves the Bryans less than $20/month, then I’d suggest that meter-watching is not really a productive use of anyone’s time — unless, of course, you enjoy that sort of thing. But, if global warming regulation is enacted and electricity prices skyrocket and/or energy is eventually rationed, then meter-watching could, for many, become more of a necessity as opposed to an optional fetish, particularly for those in lower income brackets. GE will profit, of course, from selling the home monitors and the more-expensive “smart” appliances. But it’s not at all clear that consumers will get any benefits at all since they’ll be paying more for the appliances and more for electricity. The common sense public policy move would be to increase our electricity supplies and reduce its cost by building needed power plants and transmissions lines and forgoing government mandates on fuels and emissions — so that we don’t have to sweat electricity use. I’d bet that GE would make more money from making electricity cheaper than it would from making it more expensive.
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Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and GreenHellBlog.com and is the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them