How To Get Cheap Electricity

We all know about expensive fuel prices and how that in turn affects the price of electricity. So how cool would it be to actually spend less on electricity? Well you can and it doesn't matter who your current electricity supplier is or even whether you're in Canada, Australia, the USA, the UK or anywhere else for that matter; you can have easy access to cheap electricity.

Now to be honest, this is not so much about how or where to find cheap electricity, as about how to spend much less on your electric fuel bills, which sort of amounts to the same thing. Think about it; if you were able to find a supplier of cheap electricity that would mean what exactly? That you would spend less on electricity bills. So spending less of your hard earned income on electricity, yet not cutting back on the things you use electricity for, would for all intents and purposes be as good as finding cheap electricity.

So how exactly do you find cheap electricity (or spend much less on electricity bills)? Well to answer that, just ask yourself what you use electricity for. Well, how about lighting, that's an obvious one isn't it?

Using domestic energy consumption in the USA as an example, lighting can account for anywhere between 10% to 40% of most household electricity bills. The reason for the lower 10% figure isn't by the way that some households spend less on domestic lighting, but that some people in some regions use disproportionately more electricity for heating or cooling which obviously tends to skew the proportion of the total spent on lighting. Taking into account the use of other forms of energy (e.g. gas) commonly used for heating and cooking, electric lighting eats up to 25% of the average overall domestic energy budget.

Now imagine being able to more or less cut that 10-40% out of your electricity bills (or 25% out of your total energy budget). That's up to nearly half as much electricity consumption which in terms of cost savings to you works out the same as if you were getting half-price electricity. Now that is seriously cheap electricity.

So how's it done? How can you almost completely eliminate your lighting costs? You've probably already guessed that energy saving lights (also known as low energy lighting) is where this is heading, but there's more to the subject of low consumption light bulbs than many folk realise.

Now, most people are aware of CFL energy saving light bulbs, not least because of their unappealing looks and the many other significant problems with CFLs. But they do for the most part do what it says on the tin - save energy.

So exactly how much by way of CFL energy savings can you expect to get? The answer is that CFL bulbs are about four times as efficient as regular incandescent light bulbs, which means simply that they consume only 25% of the electricity required to power an equivalent incandescent light bulb and thus cost 75% less to run. For every $1000 you currently spend on electric lighting you would save $750 by installing CFL light bulbs. Not bad.

But we can do better than that. Loads better in fact. The less well known (for the moment) route to low energy lighting is installing LED lights. This is something most folk can begin doing by replacing existing low-voltage halogen spotlights with 12v LED lights.

So how do LED ultra low consumption light bulbs compare with CFL energy savings? Well, at present LED lights are ten times as efficient as incandescent lighting meaning that they consume 1/10th as much electricity and therefore cost 90% less to run. On that $1000 lighting bill you would save $900. It's a real simple question isn't it? Do you want to spend a thousand dollars to light your home or one hundred dollars?

But wait, it gets better still. Thanks to Haitz's Law we know that over the course of each decade the price of LED lighting drops by a factor of ten while the power output increases by a factor of twenty. Put into slightly more immediate terms, every eighteen months sees domestic LED lighting double in power while at the same getting cheaper. The closest analogy we're all familiar with these days is personal computing power which behaves in a similar fashion. Just as the first PCs were relatively expensive and limited in what they could do, so anyone who thinks that LED garden lights represents the capability of LED lighting just hasn't a clue how huge this technological tsunami is going to be.

So, start switching to domestic LED lighting and you could already eliminate over a third of your electricity bills (remember, 40% of electricity spent on lighting, now cut to 4% which gives a saving of 36% or slightly more than 1/3rd). Stick with LED lighting and it will just keep getting better as light power constantly increases, prices decrease and efficiency improves exponentially from using 10% of the electricity consumed by existing lighting to just 1% and even lower.

In the not so distant future, LED lighting will become so efficient that it hardly uses any electricity at all and becomes almost free to run. Which brings us to the truth about modern electrical lighting and answers those who complain about the cost of energy saving bulbs. Forget about the price of a light bulb, energy cost is all that counts. So you still want to find cheap electricity? Low enery lighting is what you need then - if you can run your domestic lighting consuming 10% or less of the electricity you're using now then how cheap do you need electricity to be to compete with that?