There are some things you need to know:

United Power is a nonprofit 501 (c)(12) co-op controlled by us, the users, by electing a board of directors. This is good! Let’s keep data center supporters off the board!

United Power has invested in extensive battery power. They take power from the grid during cheap times and release it during expensive times of day to keep prices cheaper for us. This is good!

When talking about your home use, you generally use watts (w) or kilowatts (kw). There are 1,000 watts in a kilowatt. For example, you might use a 60 watt light bulb in a lamp. This would mean over 1 hour, your light bulb would use 60 w. If it was on for 24 hours, it would use 1.44 kw. A house might use 20 kw or much more in a day. My house can use as little as 9 kw per day (generally no heat or a/c, little to no cooking or laundry, long daylight hours, so few lights) to as many as a record (for us) 68 kw, such as when it is 110 degrees, overnight temps are in the mid 70s for lows, and the a/c is struggling to keep up, and maybe you have some laundry to do! Over the last 4 years on a daily average, we’ve used between 17.02 kw and 20.82 kw per day.

How to understand your United Power billing:

For our household, we have 3 things that draw a lot of power (4-6 kw each if run for 1 straight hour): the central air conditioning, the clothes dryer, and the oven. If you run all three at the same time, you could be pulling a lot of energy (12 – 18 kw). Power companies don’t like that, because it makes the grid, that they have to keep adequately charged for everybody, hard to predict. These high loads (running all 3 high demand items among other household things) generally happen between 5:00-9:00 when everybody is getting home from work, cooking meals, doing laundry, and kicking the a/c on to cool the house down. This is why many electric utilities, such as United Power and Xcel Energy offer cheaper rates at certain times of day, if you sign up for it. There are also programs, that for a discount to you, allow them to control your home thermostat to allow better grid control during high grid system use.

United Power charges very high rates for your highest use in the month, even if not a full hour. United Power, in order to maintain the grid and not have to purchase more power at a really expensive time of day to do so, charges a demand rate of $4.55 – $5.50 per kWh for your highest monthly draw (depending on your chosen plan). So, if you run the dryer, a/c, and oven at the same time at 18 kWh, look out! You can easily add $82 – $99 to your bill! Now if you just ran 1 of these at a 6 kWh for your maximum draw for the month, that would be $27-$33. If you had solar and ran those things while the sun was out, you could completely or nearly completely eliminate that charge. I often see people complaining about their United Power bills, and I wonder if it is because they don’t understand their billing. Timing and load matter, not just for you, but for the nationwide grid.

Power in the state of Colorado compared to other states:

Now, overall, electric power in our utility and state is cheaper to average than in other states. Don’t let politicians fool you on this point. If they say otherwise, they are likely getting paid by an entity that wants to rip us all off. The U.S. average is $0.1844/kWh. In Colorado, the average is $0.1616/kWh.

Depending on your United Power plan (which you can change by calling them), you pay for:

• $22 to be connected to the grid (most utilities have a fee like this, and you must pay it even if not using power)
• $0.0557 – $0.1880 (often the lower rate is paired with the higher rate and depends on time of use)
• $0.1184 (United Power’s flat rate 24/7, if you don’t want to shift your usage)
• $4.55-5.50 (demand charge, based on your highest usage in the month)

There is 1 plan that has additional charges.

United Power is “doing the good stuff” to try to get people to pay attention to their electricity use, because it costs them (well, all of us) a lot more money to obtain electricity between 5:00-9:00. When people use a lot of power at once, across many homes on the grid, it can create problems. United Power needs to pay for extra power to keep the grid here running smoothly.

For comparison, for-profit PG&E in California (think of all the tech being powered there and the deplorable history they have) charges $0.22 – $0.62 per kWh depending on a variety of factors, such as time of day and year. I’ll let you try to figure out their plans if you want here.

Some states I looked at allowed you to choose which power company you used, and they all had more expensive starting flat rates (2-8 cents higher per kWh than United Power), and some looked like you had to sign a contract that only guaranteed that rate for 6 months to a year.

With all of that said, I want us to make sure we appreciate United Power being a nonprofit co-op, and that we have a say in how it runs. Not all Colorado utilities are like this. I also think we should pay attention to who runs for boards in the future, as I wouldn’t be at all surprised if data center supporters started running for board seats. I also want you to appreciate the grid struggles and how we all contribute to them. The bottom line is that United Power is NOT the enemy, and we need to keep that in mind.

More to come on electricity and data centers.