Switch to Ambit Energy Service Electricity and Natural Gas with Confidence
The process for switching your energy service is quite simple AND FREE. All the consumer needs to do is contact the Retail Energy Provider (REP) you’d like to establish service with. More than likely, the price for service will be lower than what you’re paying now.
Deregulation is a process that is designed to help the consumer. Until deregulation, the consumer did not have a choice of electricity providers. This meant that the electricity provider could charge virtually any price it wants. The main goals of deregulation are to drive the prices of electricity down, and open up the marketplace to competition. This does not always happen. There are times when the prices actually go up. However, that is extremely rare.
Even though the consumer in Texas has had a choice of REP’s for a couple of years, at a minimum 70% of the market has not exercised that choice. Most consumers site unreliability as a main reason for not having switched. This is not an issue. The equipment, the power grid, which are the wires through which the electricity flows are owned and maintained by a seperate company. No matter who supplies you with electric power, it will ultimately travel across the same power lines.
The result of this is that no one from your new REP has to come out to your home for any reason. The same meter reader will come next month, just as last. The ONLY differences are that the price should be lower, you’ll have to write the check to the new REP. Because the prices are regulated by the area government, price gouging will not occur.
At Ambit Energy Service, once you’ve made the decision to switch to Ambit, a customer service representative will contact you by phone within just a few minutes. They will verify that you indeed are switching to Ambit. Once the verification process is complete, you will receive your first bill from Ambit Energy Service on your next normal billing cycle.
Please note that no matter who you choose to contract with for energy service, the process is the same.
By law, the consumer has to choose. So, choose wisely and know that it’s a winning situation for the consumer.
Sourse: Switch to Ambit Energy Service Electricity and Natural Gas with Confidence
Energy Saving and Technology
The New York Times has a great article on how using web based tools consumers can monitor and save energy. Users in the study saved up to 20% just by becoming aware of their own usage.
My team and I created a business plan for utility companies to start using energy monitors in my Management of Innovation class. Through our research we found that energy monitors are probably going to become something as common and simple to use as a thermostat. The monitors offer real-time usage reports. Some monitoring systems are more advanced than others, but all in all they all seem to help users save energy. In the UK real-time energy monitors are going to be provided by the government for free in efforts to reduce energy usage.
Here are some more links with information and reviews of products currently available.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/07/wattson_monitor.php
http://www.diykyoto.com/
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/05/the-home-joule.php
http://consumerpowerline.com/homejoule/
http://www.powermeterstore.com/index.php?cPath=628
http://www.energymonitor.com/
http://www.theenergydetective.com/index.html
http://www.powercostmonitor.com/p3982/power_cost_monitor.php
http://www.digitalreviews.net/reviews/miscellaneous/kill-a-watt-energy-monitor.html
Sourse: Energy Saving and Technology
Ambit Energy and Saving BIG Money in Texas
If your interested in saving B I G money on one of your most expensive monthly bills, your electric bill, then you’ve come to the right place. Compare your current bill. Go to http://oldestpet.joinambit.com/service_quote.asp and see for yourself. At our lowest rate of 10.99 cent/kwh, you can start saving now. Be a new customer and Ambit, at no cost to switch, will send you a voucher for a free 2-night, 3-day stay at one of 25 resorts across the U.S. Join Now - http://oldestpet.joinambit.com
Thanks for your time and have a great day.
Sourse: Ambit Energy and Saving BIG Money in Texas
Can you live without electricity for a month?
Personally I think this is very hard to do, for one we wouldn’t be able to eat, because the refrigerator wouldn’t be working, so there would be no cold milk for my 3 year old son, or ice for cold drinks, not even any meat to cook. I couldn’t afford going to the grocery store to by them daily. Yes, this would be gr eat for a diet but it isn’t the best way to good about losing weight. I wouldn’t even have a stove to cook on, since mine is electric.
Working by candle light is no fun either about four years ago while I was 6 months pregnant with our son we had a major storm blow through, it wasn’t a tornado if I remember correctly it was a down burst or something like that. It blew a large branch out of the tree behind our house. There were lots of trees down in about four different towns in the area. So I could not go and stay with family because they had no power either, and we had animals and no one wanted them to come a long. This happened about mid July and here in Indiana it can great pretty hot, and humid. My husband worked 3rd shift, so most of the time I was by myself. To occupy my time for 8hours or more while he was at work of sleeping, I would sit at our dinning room table, with a candle at night for light and do my crafts. Now it is not easy cutting out brown gingerbread man ornaments from brown paper in the dark. Candle light is good to work by but it can also been hard on your eyes. I was making these ornaments to give to our nieces and nephews for Christmas that year. We had a cooler so I could have something to drink, a sandwich, and what other food items a pregnant women needs. There was very little breeze coming in the windows, which made it a little tougher on this pregnant woman. Now I don’t grip about the heat because I love it, but when there isn’t even a fan to blow the air around it can get pretty worm. I couldn’t listen to the radio, watch the news to see what was going on, and the only clock that worked in the house. Was my husbands wrist watch, because we never really bought battery powered clock because every appliance we own has a clock on it, so why would you think you needed any thing different.
It took about 2 weeks to get our power back on, because since the electric box was actually off of the house. The electric company told us we had to put this back on the house before they could do anything. Well we told our landlord and he thought they had to do it, so it took a while to get the box back on the house. Well then when it was knocked out off of the house it blow the transformer so I got to watch them replace the one on the pole outside of our house, with was fun to watch.
When I finally got my power back on I told my husband I never want to do that again. I know that the power will go off during a Thunder Storm during a bad blizzard. But if I can help it my power will be on.
I try and conserve energy when I can, but my house is very dark even in the day time so you need some lights on to do your daily task. I hope we one day to have a home that is bright and cheerful and full of sunlight during the day time. Until then it is me with my lights on during the day, so I can see what I am doing.
What would your answer be? Think about it…
* Marla *
Sourse: Can you live without electricity for a month?
Common Household Appliance Energy Use
Listed at this website are some common appliances, their wattage and an estimate of operating costs. There is also a simple formula for calculating operating costs. Note: I do not know how current that website is.
Sourse: Common Household Appliance Energy Use
Honda moves into the solar cell market
Honda’s wholly-owned solar cell subsidiary, Honda Soltec Co., began mass production of solar cells in October 2007. Other interesting activities being conducted by Honda are researching cellulosic ethanol production and household cogeneration units.
Sourse: Honda moves into the solar cell market
Killing Phantom Loads to Lower Electricity Usage
As you may remember from the post on our plans to reduce our electricity usage by 50%, one of our strategies was to eliminating phantom loads within our home.
First let me start by explaining what phantom loads are and how they have crept into our homes. A phantom load is the power that is […]
Sourse: Killing Phantom Loads to Lower Electricity Usage
Passing the hat round for the Co-Op
Unfortunately in their search for the Holy Grail politicians have in turn adopted various environmentally produced energy technologies. The first to be adopted and then discarded were photovoltaic cells.
It is hard to explain photovoltaics in layman’s terms and can be quite hard to understand so if you don’t want to read the technical stuff, skip the next two paragraphs.
PV started with Becquerel in 1839 and then Willoughby Smith, Hertz, Max Planck and even Einstein found that light shining on a metal can create energy proportional to the frequency of the light. When the light strikes the metal, the energy from the photons is transferred to electrons in the metal. If that energy is greater than what is required to overcome the forces which keep the electron in the metal, the energy will be released. The result is that light with a high enough frequency can knock electrons out of a metal surface.
The displaced electrons are freed to move about, forming a “conduction band”, and a hole is left behind where the freed electrons used to be. They are “harnessed” by the use of semiconductors with different electrical characteristics so that an electric field is generated. This field causes positive and negative charges to move in opposite directions, thus creating electric current. I hope that I have explained this reasonably accurately and if I have not no doubt someone out there will let me know.
Anyway when you understand that you use light to generate electricity you will understand how attractive this must seem to politicians looking for the Holy Grail; they thought they had found it, with these photovoltaic cells, which have been confusing called solar panels but now are know as “PV”.
PV superficially sounds much more impressive than using light to generate heat (which is what real solar panels do), because electricity is often associated in people’s mind with energy and they tend to ignore heat. That is a shame because you can live without electricity – it will be hard but people have done it for tens of thousands of years, but people have lived with heat and in most places would die in winter without heat.
In Manchester, Europe’s largest vertical photovoltaic project was installed at the Co-operative Insurance Society Tower. This project was subsided by the state (that is you and me, folks) to the tune of just over £1 million, although what business the government has in subsiding a commercial organisation like the Co-op (turnover £9.4 billion) is entirely beyond me. Interestingly enough the amount given by the taxpayer to the Co-Op was virtually the maximum that is permitted to be given for a project of this nature under the European Community’s State Aid rules.
PV re-cladding was predicted to result in a rated power output of between 250 and 350 kWp and was expected to meet only 10% of the building electricity requirements by generating it is hoped 180MWh electricity per year. I have not been able to find out any data yet as to whether the project met its expectations.
Governments all over the world provided subsidies for PV because the environmental cost of electricity generated is very high, although if you look at the carbon cost in making the PV and spread that over the life time of the PV it is much more carbon productive than first thought. They hope to attract investment in building PV cell manufacturing plants to create jobs (although when they do they frequently have to subsidise the establishment of a factory).
Governments have listened to multi national companies that have invested in PV technology. Mr Blair took advice from Lord Browne who ran BP, one of the most carbon producing businesses on earth. BP invested in PV, and claimed a “green” sustainable image as a result. Mr Blair bought the sales pitch and set up a very generous PV grants system.
The Co-op was not the only company or person that was able to access these large grants. At one time PV attracted a grant of 50% of the cost, which meant that if you were building your own house, provided you could access the grant, and you wanted to have a PV roof, the taxpayer would pay half of the cost up to £15,000. This struck me as wrong; someone with the cash to build their own home should not get half a PV roof paid for by the state.
This has now been changed; the PV grants are still very generous compared with other technologies – around £2,500 – but the drop in grants has affected the PV market, causing it to decline. Of course the smaller businesses that sell and install PV are worse affected; somehow the multi-nationals will survive a down turn in a business that does not even represent 1% of their portfolio.
The problem with efficient photovoltaics is that they use broad spectrum light whereas they would operate more efficiently at only at specific narrow part of the light spectrum. Anything outside this narrow part of the spectrum cannot be converted to electricity. Also their efficiency drops as they become older, and in very hot weather. At freezing point silicon has a maximum theoretical efficiency of 24%; at room temperature this drops to 12%. The laws of physics mean that photovoltaic cells decrease in efficiency as the temperature of the cell increases.
The best and most efficient use of PV is when it eliminates the need for batteries in many calculators. Many places have now installed photovoltaic cells to operate parking meters and some street lighting, but this really makes no sense environmentally.
Photovoltaics really become effective in “off-grid” situations. In places where the cost of bringing power lines or building generating plants is expensive, the PV offers a good solution which is both environmentally friendly and cost effective. It makes no sense to me to install PV in Manchester at public expense. If the Co-op wants to make an environmental statement for reasons of good corporate governance then I applaud them, but let them do that with their own money.
In the real world £1 million would provide free solar water heating systems for three hundred poor people and that would save more energy and more carbon dioxide emissions and save the poor some money.
Sourse: Passing the hat round for the Co-Op
Adelaide’s solar electric bus
The Adelaide City Council’s new electric bus is to be recharged using 100% solar energy. The Tindo, the Kaurna Aboriginal name for sun, will be used everyday on the Adelaide City Council’s free Adelaide Connector Bus service.
Sourse: Adelaide’s solar electric bus
It is bordered by 2006 august electricity turkmenistan to the southeast.
Why are the Wheels Coming Off the Blogroll Bandwagon.
The first two tests for the presidential Actress myanmar process.
Huckabee leads Republicans in South Carolina poll. Nearly a year after President Lazytown stephanie Niazov. Art and sport were cut from the school curriculum.
Sourse: It is bordered by 2006 august electricity turkmenistan to the southeast.
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