1 hour ago, swansont said:

Looking at the average bill is not particularly informative; it’s going to vary by location in the US owing to the different climates we can experience, it fluctuates over the course of the year, and it depends on how you heat your home, as Cap’n pointed out.

She hasn’t even hit the coldest part of winter, though this past December where I am in NY was colder than average, so it likely was for her, too.

Also, the article says “energy bill” not “electricity bill” and that “the gas is still off” so the large bill may indeed be (in part) because she’s using resistive heat now

According to a few analyses, resistive heating is somewhere around 2.5 - 3x more expensive than gas, (~4x in this one https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/true-cost-of-energy-comparisons-apples-to-apples.html )

so having the bill jump up because of that doesn’t seem so surprising. It doesn’t excuse the reporting for not detailing that and painting it as a rate hike.

Yes, electricity is typically 4 x the cost of gas in the UK. This is historically understandable, due to the far greater infrastructure needed to generate and distribute electricity and of course the fact that a lot of it is generated with an efficiency of <50% from fossil fuel. However what seems criminal nowadays is that the development of renewable generation, and the investment this necessitates in the distribution network, is all loaded onto electricity bills, while the legacy fossil fuel we are all trying to reduce dependence on incurs none of these costs. It's a political hot potato of course, as in the UK most people use gas for heating and we can't have elderly poor people freezing to death in their homes because they can't pay the gas bill. But I feel we really do need to start cross-subsidising since at the moment all the incentives are to retain the old gas boiler.

Edited January 13Jan 13 by exchemist

20 minutes ago, exchemist said:

. But I feel we really do need to start cross-subsidising since at the moment all the incentives are to retain the old gas boiler.

Are boiler/radiator systems easily convertible from gas-fired to a heat pump? I know upfront costs are daunting when it's necessary to tear out an existing system entirely. In the US, sometimes the FAG ductwork all has to be replaced with larger bore when a HP goes in, because the old ducts can't move the volume of air required by a HP. So you need new larger registers, plenum, everything. (Boiler systems less common here in homes, but I've heard they can be quite efficient) One reason minisplit HPs are popular is they skip around the whole duct system nightmare.

53 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Are boiler/radiator systems easily convertible from gas-fired to a heat pump? I know upfront costs are daunting when it's necessary to tear out an existing system entirely. In the US, sometimes the FAG ductwork all has to be replaced with larger bore when a HP goes in, because the old ducts can't move the volume of air required by a HP. So you need new larger registers, plenum, everything. (Boiler systems less common here in homes, but I've heard they can be quite efficient) One reason minisplit HPs are popular is they skip around the whole duct system nightmare.

Hmm, not sure what FAG ductwork means in a US context😳. Does this mean a ducted warm air system is common in the US, rather than hot water radiators?

I think @studiot is the person with experience of transitioning to a heat pump system. I explored it a bit but was told there wasn't a big enough heat pump for a house like mine so I'd need a supplemental boiler on top, at which point I gave it up. I was also given conflicting advice about whether a heat pump could work with the existing radiators, which are designed for a gas-fired hot water system. Some said yes, but others said that heat pumps put out heat at a lower temperature (in order to stay efficient) so bigger radiators are needed. That for me would be the kiss of death as I have about 20 of them spread across 3 floors. Also I've been told the system needs to run all day, not just run on a timer for periods when the house is occupied. Everyone says heat pumps work well with underfloor heating pipes, but that is really suitable for new builds, not retrofitting to a Victorian place like mine.

The steam (haha) seems to have gone out of the UK government's earlier talk of encouraging a switch to heat pumps. It may be that age of our housing stock makes it too hard to implement for many people. But for new houses it ought to be mandatory - and I think it will be in a few years' time.

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

Hmm, not sure what FAG ductwork means in a US context😳. Does this mean a ducted warm air system is common in the US, rather than hot water radiators?

Ha, yes, FAG (forced air gas) is most common here. In places like Oregon, where hydro on the Columbia R used to crank out the watts very cheaply, some places had forced air with electric furnaces. (FAEF?) Some areas, with mild West Coast weather, there wouldn't even be residential gas lines, just electric heat. The worst was baseboard heat, which occupied so much of the room margins that it was awkward placing furniture.

It occurs to me now that a better acronym than FAG would be FANG, but I still see only the former used.

My question is does the electric company turn a profit? In my state utilities companies govern themselves. We have no idea what their expenditures are and how they figure what to charge. It would be hard to compare to other countries.

Maybe compare the environmental resources used to the total utilities used a year. I heard about the resources a person uses versus the number of acres of resources per person on the show Explorations. For example someone in the US could pay less for the same amount of resources used by someone in Africa. And at the same time pay less while consuming more energy.

8 hours ago, Trurl said:

My question is does the electric company turn a profit? In my state utilities companies govern themselves. We have no idea what their expenditures are and how they figure what to charge. It would be hard to compare to other countries.

Maybe compare the environmental resources used to the total utilities used a year. I heard about the resources a person uses versus the number of acres of resources per person on the show Explorations. For example someone in the US could pay less for the same amount of resources used by someone in Africa. And at the same time pay less while consuming more energy.

This is a very pertinent question, which might be even better if you expanded on your second paragraph. +1

We have lots of different company models, in the UK, some for profit and some not for profit.

Either way our glorious politicians have chosen to tax utility supplies to domestic consumers, so this is an additional cost which has nothing to do with either the ecological or engineering issues around winning the supply, generation or distribution.

1 hour ago, studiot said:

This is a very pertinent question, which might be even better if you expanded on your second paragraph. +1

We have lots of different company models, in the UK, some for profit and some not for profit.

Either way our glorious politicians have chosen to tax utility supplies to domestic consumers, so this is an additional cost which has nothing to do with either the ecological or engineering issues around winning the supply, generation or distribution.

Well, stuff does have to be paid for, you know. 😉

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

Well, stuff does have to be paid for, you know. 😉

Indeed, but the right stuff is difficult to determine if we decide to declare the leaf as legitimate currency; we may need to burn down a few forests... 😇

On 1/13/2026 at 11:04 PM, Trurl said:

My question is does the electric company turn a profit? In my state utilities companies govern themselves. We have no idea what their expenditures are and how they figure what to charge. It would be hard to compare to other countries.

In the state of Pennsylvania, AFAIK all of the electric utilities make a profit with typical return on equity rarely going below 5% and often near 10% or above. All rate hikes have to be rubber stamped looked into and approved by the Public Utilities Commission with a period for public comment before approval. Sometimes the increase is less than requested or one is put on hold for other reasons but I can never recall a decrease or outright rejection of a hike, though it probably has happened.

47 minutes ago, npts2020 said:

In the state of Pennsylvania, AFAIK all of the electric utilities make a profit with typical return on equity rarely going below 5% and often near 10% or above. All rate hikes have to be rubber stamped looked into and approved by the Public Utilities Commission with a period for public comment before approval. Sometimes the increase is less than requested or one is put on hold for other reasons but I can never recall a decrease or outright rejection of a hike, though it probably has happened.

I think situations like this are part of the reason communities are able to defeat efforts to put large data centers nearby, since they use resources subject to public approval. If utility rates are going to jump, people show up to the public hearings and voice their displeasure. Some politicians will see that they’ll get voted out of office if they contradict strong public opinion.