Want to know how your state legislator voted and/or what they sponsored? Got your smart meter yet? Bear with me: busy time of year.
Want to know how your state legislator voted and/or what they sponsored?
The link below is to Liberty Scorecard Colorado's guide from the last legislative session. It lists the legislator, their voting record, and any bills they sponsored.
Let me end by putting in a special word for checking your own legislator's record even if you think they're "safe".
I like to use Rep Soper as a reference for this because you might assume, given that he's a Western Slope Republican, that he represents your values well. If things like government transparency are important to you, however, you might disagree with his votes and his sponsorship of a bill that would have made CORA requests harder.
https://libertyscorecardco.us/voting-records-and-sponsored-bills/
Got your smart meter yet?
I have been watching for Xcel to warn me about coming out to install smart meters in my neighborhood like a hawk. And come they did. Then a couple days later, I got an email telling me they were coming in 30 days.
I wrote an op ed detailing the experience (and what getting the smart meter/time of use pricing means) for Complete and I put a link to if first below if you want to revel in some of the details, or if you want some context on what I'm talking about.
After it posted in Complete, I got an interesting email from a reader that I thought I'd share. I was under the impression that you either get the smart meter (with time of use pricing), or you opt out and pay a fee, but I was wrong.
Per the email from the reader, it's not a binary choice: smart meter or fee. That is, you can get the smart meter and still opt out of the time of use pricing. Alternatively, if you weren't watching and already have the meter, and your eyes have popped out of your head at the increase in pricing, you also can opt out.**
Link 2 below is an overview and I took a screenshot of it, highlighting the fact that you can still opt out of the pricing. This is attached as screenshot 1.
Link 3 below goes into more detail. To see it, be prepared to do a fair bit of scrolling. Keep rolling down the page until you see what I attached as screenshot 2.
If you are wondering at difference in pricing, I found the tables from Xcel's various sites and put them all in screenshot 3. This gives a comparison of the opt out rate vs. the time of use rate for both what Xcel calls summer and winter.
I wrote back to the gentleman that responded to my op ed and told him it would be an interesting mathematical problem to find the "intersections" in the pricing; that is the consumption times and amounts that define where the two pricing schemes are the same monthly cost. Right now I'm trying to think if there's a way to do that would be more accessible than reams of numbers in an Excel spreadsheet. If I do come up with something, I'll update.
In the meantime, I think a rougher "approximate" understanding, the one that Xcel offers is probably a good guide. Quoting from the fourth link below:
"Who may benefit from this plan? Residential Opt Out rate could be beneficial to large energy users, or those with inflexible schedules who use their energy during peak time and cannot shift their energy usage."
If that sounds like you, or if you don't want to "be flexible" to use Xcel's euphemistic language, you might consider opting out of the time of use pricing (even if you have that smart meter already).
**This is more speculative, and I will admit (as I do in my op ed) more conspiratorial, but unfortunately if you have the smart meter I don't think you are free from Xcel shutting your house off if they need to do some grid balancing or demand management on a small scale.
https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2024/08/08/gaines-xcel-smart-meter-comedy-tour/
https://co.my.xcelenergy.com/customersupport/s/article/Can-I-opt-out-of-the-Time-of-Use-plan
https://co.my.xcelenergy.com/s/billing-payment/residential-rates/time-of-use-pricing
https://co.my.xcelenergy.com/s/billing-payment/residential-rates/residential-opt-out-pricing
Related:
Sent in by a reader (though a different one than I refer to above). This is from the Colorado Springs Utility about their smart meters. If you are not on Xcel or the Springs and want to share what you've seen from your own utility, please add to the comments.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SKA052BoWMEb-wyyU4PGCJfnBTXfyall/view?usp=sharing
Bear with me.
Might be a bit spotty on posting over the next little bit.
Nothing's wrong, nothing has changed.
I am a teacher and this is a busy time of year (on top of that, I also garden and preserve food so this is a DOUBLY busy time of year).
I'll be watching things. I'll be collecting things to share. My inboxes are still open for ideas.
Going to run in first gear for a few laps, but I'm not going anywhere.