Understanding Energy Demand & Purchasing
Do you ever look at your electricity bill and wonder what it all means? If so, you might be interested in learning how energy demand and purchasing impact your utility bill.
To start, it’s important to understand how electricity is made and how it’s delivered to your home.
Before Rio Grande Electric Cooperative can send electricity to your home, it needs to be generated by a power supplier. It then travels over high-voltage transmission lines to substations, where the voltage is reduced to a safer level. Then it travels through distribution power lines and transformers on its way to your home.
You play a big part in determining how much electricity needs to be generated to satisfy our members’ power needs. That’s where the terms “demand” and “consumption” come in.
Demand is measured in kilowatts, and consumption is measured in kilowatt-hours. A light bulb consumes a certain number of watts, let’s say 100 watts per hour. If that light bulb stays on for 10 hours, it uses 1,000 watts, or 1 kilowatt.
If you turn on 10 of those 100-watt bulbs for 1 hour, you’re still consuming 1 kW. However, you’re placing demand on the Co-op to have that kW available to you over the course of 1 hour, instead of 10 hours. This requires our power supplier to produce more power in less time to meet your demand.
RGEC purchases kilowatt-hours based on the peak demand of our members. This is typically during the evening, when families return home from work or school, cook dinner, and use appliances the most. That’s why using electricity during this peak demand period often costs us more.
You can help lower that peak demand—and your electric bill—by shifting energy-consuming tasks to a time outside the peak, which is typically 7–9 p.m. Adjustments like setting the dishwasher to run just before you go to bed, cooking outside on the grill, and not setting the thermostat quite so cool can make a difference.
Generating and distributing power can be a tricky and complicated business, but rest assure,d Rio Grande Electric works diligently to plan for and meet the energy demands of our members.