Energy Bill

We received our quarterly electricity bill recently.

We’re down to 4.8kWh per day – at the same time last year our use was 5.8kWh.

To put our 4.8 in perspective I’ve believe the Australian ‘average’ household daily use is anything from 16-25kWh per day.
We have a 1.4kW photovoltaic system on our roof (installed in 2009).

We feed back into the grid (grid-connected) so we don’t have a stand-alone battery system. This means we sell our energy to our electricity company at one price and buy it back from them for another.

We had a 2.8kW inverter installed so we could double the number of panels we have in the future. We currently have six 175watt panels.

A ‘1.4kW’ system means it should be making 1.4kW of energy per optimum sunlight hours per day – here on the Sunshine Coast the optimum sunlight hours per day is six. So we should be making (optimally) 8.4kW per day.

In the last quarter, we made $95.50 worth of energy. (191kWh paid at .50cents per kWh)

We used $88.69 worth of energy. (431kWh billed at .20.69cents per kWh – less than half the price we sell it for) PS that 431kWh was over 90 days, so 431 divided by 90 = 4.78 – our daily usage.

If it was as simple as that we would have got a cheque back for $6.81.

But there are other fees;

On top of the $88.69 worth of energy we bought, we also paid $21.55 to ensure that energy we bought back from the supplier was green – in this case wind power.

By doing this we’re ‘offsetting’ our energy use.

Reduce consumption
Use alternative sources (in our case solar)
Offset the difference (buying wind energy)

The energy we do buy from the grid is not sourced from fossil fuel, instead its sourced from wind energy companies.

This means our home has zero carbon emissions. No fossil fuel energy usage here.

So the other fees added onto our bill are;

Energy use; $88.69

Green offset; $21.55

Service fees; $23.45 (visiting the property, invoice processing)

Community Ambulance Cover; this is a cost Queenslanders have been charged, but aren’t as of July 1, 2011. So we only had a $2.39 fee to cover from June 22 to July 1. We won’t be billed at all from now on.

So

Total charges; $136.08

Less what we made; $95.50

New total; $40.58

Plus; (goods and services tax)

GST; $13.38

Total; $53.96 for the quarter.

We know our summer bills are going to be slightly higher because we use the ceiling fans, but with some clever modification to the design of our home – as part of our eco-retrofit – we’ll fix that problem.

Plus having a solar hot water system makes a HUGE difference.

Now the challenge is out – to get it below 4.8kWh per day for this time next year.