U.S. Declining Energy Usage

by | Sep 9, 2009 | Industry News

Here’s a fairly informative article talking about the decrease in American’s demand for electricity over the past year. It’s pretty interesting in that it points out how the last time the drop in usage year over year for electricity in America was back in the 1940’s, so obviously this is a pretty rare occurrence, especially considering our growing dependence on electronic items like laptops, cell phones, televisions, etc. The reduction is obviously being attributed to the current difficulties in the US Economy, with unemployment currently at 15 million and the outlook for jobs still looking gloomy.

Anyway, the article goes on to discuss electricity savings and how they’re directly tied into a lower demand. The industrial market, which covers businesses (especially manufacturing ones as well) has dropped because of businesses closing up shop and decreased demand. This as well as a residential market that is cutting back and tightening their belt everywhere they can has caused lowered prices in the wholesale market, which is responding to decreased demand.

At the bottom of the article, Texas is singled out as a market that should see savings sooner as opposed to later. Because energy in Texas is based upon short term natural gas prices, any reduction in pricing and demand reflects our bills much faster than other areas who have a long term only approach to keep electricity prices at an even keel. For example, TXU customers got a 15% reduction in their bill in August (on Average) according to this article because natural gas prices are down 80%. Those numbers are probably similar across all of the Texas electricity providers and customer bills.

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