Skip to main content

Prepaid electricity

Image
By
via Wikimedia
Atrios:
As dirty fucking hippies predicted, because we've been through this before with telephone deregulation, electricity "competition" will lead to companies engaging in dubious practices to bilk you out of your money. Electricity isn't like gas or a bottle of milk. You use it most of the time without having any sense of the per unit cost (both per kilowatt hours and how many kilowatt hours your teevee users), you just know roughly what your bill "should" be based on past experience. This is just one more pain in the ass for people who have enough pains in the asses to deal with.
I think he's right about the likely effects of electricity deregulation and how people don't pay much attention to their electricity bill, but I'd say people should pay more attention to it even if it is a bit of a pain in the ass.  (Though I think Atrios was mostly talking about having to sift through your bill to make sure the company didn't hide a bunch of bullshit fees in this case.)

South Africa's setup is better in this regard (though way out here in the village the power is a bit intermittent).  Most people have prepaid electricity with a simple meter giving your remaining kilowatt-hours.  Five minutes at an ATM lets you buy electricity tokens with your cell phone; if you don't have a bank account, most every village shop sells them too.  I can say not only is it very easy to keep your supply up, the simply act of having to buy a token and punch it into the meter makes you pay attention to your electricity consumption in a way I never had before.  What's more, the readout is continuous, so nerdy types can experiment away.

Now, that's not going to solve the climate crisis, but in the context of some kind of sensible energy bill, it could help people (especially lower income) save some energy and money.
Labels:

Comments

  1. XariciMay 18, 2011 at 6:06 AM

    Yeah, we use this system now in Azerbaijan and it has opened my eyes as to what the real cost of electricity is. It also lets you monitor it much more closely.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b
Post a Comment
Read more

Varanus albigularis albigularis

By
That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that
4 comments
Read more

The Conversational Downsides of Twitter's Structure

By
Over the past couple years, as I've had a steady writing job and ascended from "utter nobody" to "D-list pundit," I find it harder and harder to have discussions online. Twitter is the only social network I like and where I talk to people the most, but as your number of followers increases, the user experience becomes steadily more hostile to conversation. Here's my theory as to why this happens. First is Twitter's powerful tendency to create cliques and groupthink. Back in forum and blog comment section days, people would more often hang out in places where a certain interest or baseline understanding could be assumed. (Now, there were often epic fights, cliques, and gratuitous cruelty on forums too, particularly the joke or insult variety, but in my experience it was also much easier to just have a reasonable conversation.) On Twitter, people rather naturally form those same communities of like interest, but are trapped in the same space with differe
2 comments
Read more