Electrical Service Rates

[storm5510]

Originally Posted by chalsall

Please forgive me for this, but believe it or not the United States of America is not the centre of the Universe.

I never said it was. Forgiven! I should have written, "world."

Duke Energy charges roughly 7.5% in taxes. I see much higher tax rates in the comments here. I wonder if this could be because of the generation source, like coal, hydro, gas, or nuclear? The majority of Dukes' plants are Hydro; 32 in all. Seven are nuclear. 15 use coal.

There is a big coal plant here on the Ohio River. What it generates goes to Northern Ohio. They wanted the power, but not the local health issues, such as cancer, asthma, and allergies. I won't go into the damage to buildings and automobiles caused by whatever it is they're dumping into the air.

[mackerel]

I'm currently on near enough £0.10/unit (US$0.13/kWh), but there is also a fixed daily fee which I can't remember the cost of. The more I use, the cheaper per-kWh it gets.

People at work think I'm insane as my monthly bill is greater than their quarterly bill...

[ATH]

Explanation of the Danish prices:

http://mersenneforum.org/showpost.ph...&postcount=155

[pinhodecarlos]

Originally Posted by mackerel

I'm currently on near enough £0.10/unit (US$0.13/kWh), but there is also a fixed daily fee which I can't remember the cost of. The more I use, the cheaper per-kWh it gets.

People at work think I'm insane as my monthly bill is greater than their quarterly bill...

Where are you based in UK?

[Uncwilly]

In 2009

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

I am paying the equiv of $0.090/kwh plus an addtional $0.025/kwh to make it all green power, plus sundry fees and texas.

I had a larger chart posted at one point.

[LaurV]

About $0.2US in this part of the world, more or less, which is bloody expensive considering that we do not have the salaries you have in US, and most of the money goes not into computing, but into cooling, especially in April when the average is around 40°C... I said many times that I totally envy you guys and galz living in the cold climate...

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

I had a larger chart posted at one point.

So, I'm currently paying ~$0.26 USD for a kWh of electricity.

And the more I use the more I pay. This is the exact opposite of other regions, where the more they use the less they pay. I would argue that our system make more sense for conservation of consumption.

[danaj]

Pacific Northwest U.S. for the win (Oregon, Washington, Idaho). We put up solar panels which offsets some of it also. Looks like there are a few cheaper places in Europe (Serbia, Kosovo). Wikipedia Electrity pricing shows some significantly cheaper and more expensive places.

These days I'm leaning a bit toward letting Amazon deal with it all.

[tServo]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

I see my state, Washington, has the cheapest in the US. All that hydro power. (I'm kind of kidding...I don't really think it'd break even...cooling doesn't seem like it'd be half of the electric consumption of a large datacenter?).

Actually, the cooling DOES account for roughly 50% since every watt of power consumed by the hardware is directly converted to heat. If you computer consumes 850 watts, you have an 850 watt space heater doing your computations.
In the datacenter at the hospital I just retired from, we spent more time messing with the infrastructure ( cooling, power delivery, UPS, space issues ) than the computing part of it. The breaker panel that fed power to the facility was the biggest I've ever seen; it looked like the one that Laura Dern had to reset in "Jurassic Park"
BTW, here in Central Illinois I pay 10 cents per kWh. A few years ago I was on an hourly
adjustment rate; higher during the day but VERY cheap at night & weekends.
Something happened though and I got out of it when the rates skyrocketed to 20-40 cents per kWh one month. OUCH

[Mark Rose]

Originally Posted by tServo

Actually, the cooling DOES account for roughly 50% since every watt of power consumed by the hardware is directly converted to heat. If you computer consumes 850 watts, you have an 850 watt space heater doing your computations.
In the datacenter at the hospital I just retired from, we spent more time messing with the infrastructure ( cooling, power delivery, UPS, space issues ) than the computing part of it. The breaker panel that fed power to the facility was the biggest I've ever seen; it looked like the one that Laura Dern had to reset in "Jurassic Park"

Not all cooling systems are so inefficient. Most heat pumps consume far less energy than the amount of heat they move.

Modern data centers use 90%+ of the power they consume directly for computing. I do agree it's more challenging if it's stuffed into a general purpose building.

[storm5510]

Originally Posted by tServo

...it looked like the one that Laura Dern had to reset in "Jurassic Park"

She had to pump it up. I've never actually seen one like that. Cutler-Hammer perhaps.

This is off-topic, sort of: I read where Three Mile Island is going to be shutdown completely in 2019. I suspect rates will change for many on the grid they are feeding into.