15 Cents Per Kilowatt Hour

by Jim Smelley | Oct 17, 2016

meters_web

I’m sitting across the counter from my husband while he expresses his frustration. Loudly.

“When you add up the rate we pay, the usage charge and all of these fees, these people are charging us 15 cents per kilowatt hour.” He’s not happy. Neither am I.

When we lived in Texas, we paid around 9 cents for the same amount of energy. And it was 100% green, from the wind farms out west.

We love living in Colorado, but there were two unpleasant surprises when we moved here: traffic on I-70 and an old fashioned, regulated energy market. Perhaps it’s one of those cases of not knowing what you are missing until it’s gone, but we miss being able to choose who we buy our energy from. We miss being able to express our values by choosing green energy. And most of all, we miss the price.

Why does Colorado still have a closed electricity market? I’m relatively new here, so I don’t know the historical political baggage associated with the issue here, but I do know that the deregulated market in Texas worked better for us as consumers, produced an abundance of renewable energy, and prompted the startup of many local businesses.

So, why does Colorado still have a closed electricity market? Why do I have to buy this expensive dirty electricity?

Disruption Is the New Normal

By nature, disruptors are not popular. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win, then they copy you.” We have all heard some version of this quote, and we have all seen it play out in real life. We've seen it with building...

What Would You Say You Do Here?

“I deal with the … customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills!” That famous Office Space quote from Tom Smykowski cracks me up every single time. I know Toms. I’ve been Tom. Change the quote to say, “IT Team” instead of “engineers,” and there’s a...

A Technologist, Technician, and a Technology Specialist All Walk Into a Room, Who Do You Choose?

I’ve always found the question, “What do you do for a living?” challenging to answer. And as frustrating as that deadpan question is, I’ve had an equally difficult time answering the second most common question one gets in in their life, which is, “Where do you see...

What’s in a Name?

In today’s impression-obsessed, content-rich, never-ending-narrative-building climate, there is a surplus of articles that exacerbate the importance of developing a strong competitive BRAND for your organization. But what about your company’s name? What about the...

What Is Ted Lasso Teaching Us?

Featuring Dave Allston For me, it started about six months ago… “Do you watch Ted Lasso?” This question pops up on Zoom calls. References often show up deep within the heart of important meetings as a form of verbal punctuation and most certainly are a mainstay of...

Calling Everyone Back to the DEI Table

It is no secret that 2020 put a glaring spotlight on the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in our everyday lives. As our communities reckoned with difficult questions and conversations around racial equity and justice, those topics found their way into...

We All Have Something to Learn From the Business of Fantasy Football

Some can smell it in the air. Some know the exact number of days since the last game was played (212). Some know EXACTLY how many weekends we will have once it begins (23). It is football time in America! NFL football represents a lot of things in America, but to many...

Did We Just Fall in Love With Hybrid Meetings?

Last week, we held a two-day training session for our extended leadership team. We’d been planning it for months — the meeting room, the dinner activity, the team building exercises … the works! This was, as I’m sure you’re picking up on, more than just a meeting,...

From Deck Builder to Storyteller: Five Tips to Make an Impact With Your Next Presentation

Did you know that roughly 35 million PowerPoint presentations are given each day by an estimated 500 million users worldwide? And that’s just PowerPoint — I haven’t even factored in other mediums like Prezi, Haiku Deck, or Pitcherific (look for our review of all the...

15 Cents Per Kilowatt Hour

READ MORE