The "Green Button" Benefits!

The New York City area has some of the highest electricity pricing in the country and for a consumer to start saving on his electricity bill, he first needs to know and understand his usage and how the available rate plans impact it.  NYC is served by Consolidated Edison, the delivery company for the residents in NYC and Westchester.  A full service customer of Consolidated Edison has a choice between a flat-rate plan and a Time-of-use plan

Thanks to the “Green button” initiative, utilities are moving to share and let their consumers access their personal usage data.  This profile data can be downloaded and then analyzed across the number of tariffs available to you, to see what plan suits your behavior or usage lifestyle best. This analysis can be done using tools such as the calculator and cost-analysis tools offered by Genability.

We uploaded a real “Green-Button” user profile (downloaded from another utility since ConEd does not offer it currently) into the Genability  Cost-Analysis tool and compared the data across the 2 plans offered by Con-Ed  and the results were interesting.  While the flat-rate plan proved better in Summer (July-September where the  peak rates on the time-of-use plan is as high as 28.63 cents/kWh),  the following winter months  showed that the savings from the Time-Of-Use plan reached double digits, percentage wise.

Residential  and  Religious versus Residential and  Religious (Voluntary Time-Of-Day)    for Consolidated Edison of New York

We decided to run the same profile for another utility in the central valley, Central Hudson, and we again saw visible differences between the standard and Time-of-use plans.

Residential Service  versus   Residential Service TOU 8AM-8PM  for Central Hudson Gas & Electric

In both cases, we saw distinct trends  between the Time-of-use plan versus the standard default plan.  The user can use this information to make a educated buying decision of his plan and can also tweak his usage to take full advantage of the differences in the individual plans.

While the impact will vary from profile to profile, what is certain is that  there would be a plan which will certainly suit your life-style better and could save you a few dollars along with the obvious “green” benefits. As more utilities move to make user data accessible, we encourage you all to take advantage of your data, understand your profile and make an informed decision on your energy buying habits.