December 2012 Energy Results

(I felt like the blog posting was boring so I tossed in a pic to liven it up.  Here my recent TED5000 Monitored Usage)

Hello Readers-

I hope y'all aren't still not choking down thanksgiving turkey.   Not me...but my dog is eating like a King.  Although I still think there's some gravy left in the fridge.  And let me tell you....Gravy tots....MMMmmmmmm....just saying...try it.

Back to business...I got my latest Duke Energy Bill in and the results are posted below.  It's another year of savings which is good! 

To the numbers...

December 2011 Bill
Total Energy Usage:  963 kWh
Days:  30
Average Daily Usage:  32.10 kWh/day
Billed Amount:  $92.00

December 2012 Bill (Nov 1 - Dec 3)
Total Energy Usage:  970 kWh
Days:  32
Average Daily Usage:  30.31 kWh/day (5.57% reduction from 2011)
Billed Amount:  $98.52
Absolute Savings versus 2011:  - $6.52 (you can easily see the rake hike:  7 kWh total difference is not at $0.93/kWh)
Rate Adjusted Savings versus 2011 @ 0.1056/kWh):  $10.84 (lower winter rates now).

Overall, there has been a savings, albiet small.  One thing to note is the totally different temepratures between 2011 and 2012.  It was definitely colder this year than last.  To address this I looked up the heating degree days (HDD) for 2011 versus 2012.   I used NOAA monthly climate data for Charlotte, NC posted here.

For the same time period (Nov 1 - Dec 3) in 2011, we had 446 HDDs.  This year we had 533 HDDs which is a 87 HDD increase.  To put this into perspective, let's compare the energy usage to the HDD.

For 2011: 
Energy Usage = 32.10 kWh/day
HDDs = 446
No. of Days = 30
Heating degrees (HD) = 14.87
Energy Usage per HD =   2.16 kWh/HD

For 2012: 
Energy Usage = 30.31 kWh/day
HDDs = 533
No. of Days = 32
Heating degrees (HD) = 16.66
Energy Usage per HD =   1.82 kWh/HD  (15.7% reduction)

Overall, the climate adjusted energy reduction is around 15.7%.  This isn't uber-accurate given that I'd need to subtract out non-temperature related energy usage to get a more accurate representation...but I don't have that data.  Thus, I've made the assumption that my lights/TV/cooking/etc usage has not significantly changed since 2011.