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Tag: Electricity Costs

A great AAAAAA-rated review on Angie’s list

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Check out this glowing Angie’s List Review from a White Sulphur Springs, WV, customer on March 30, 2016:

Milestone Solar Consultants, owned and operated by Bill Anderson, did our install. We purposely waited 5 to 6 months before doing a review because new stuff always looks good in the beginning but what about months later? We wanted it before the winter set in and he made that happen. ALL his workers were polite, courteous and knowledgeable about what they were doing. We had the batteries and analyzers placed in our basement. There were no boxes, wiring or any trash left lying around anywhere. They even swept. They left my house better than they found it. Mr. Anderson promised a turnkey job and that’s exactly what we got. All the wiring from the outside mounting racks to the basement equipment looks like a piece of art. Their attention to even the smallest detail is second to none! Even though they are a 4½ hour drive fro us, anytime we called him Mr. Anderson made himself available to us and was ready to drive down immediately to address any concerns or issues we had even if they turned out to be unwarranted. This shows his dedication to what he is doing, and he will do whatever is needed to see both his solar system and his customer is always happy. We’ve already experienced 3 power outages with our Electric Company and didn’t even know it. The solar system’s batteries kicked in so efficiently and quickly that our digital clocks didn’t even start blinking. When the power comes back on the batteries switch back to standby without us having to do a thing. We also ran our home on just the solar system itself, going completely off the grid (in the winter) and ran everything easily for 4 or 5 days. Which is exactly what Mr. Anderson said it would do. He has the credentials and expertise to answer any questions you pose to him. None of that, “Well I don’t know. I will have to check on that question and get back to you.” Which we had with other big name solar installers. Milestone Solar came into our home as strangers and left as family. Any and ALL questions were answered by Mr. Anderson and his crew and there were a lot of them! And we know he will ALWAYS be just a phone call away if we have more questions or need him in any way. And that speaks volumes!! If you are looking to put in a Solar Array System, it would be to your advantage to have a quote from Milestone Solar. His prices can’t be beat ESPECIALLY when he uses ONLY top quality equipment and materials. We looked at many different systems from other companies but Milestone Solar stood out by miles…no pun intended 🙂

 

Foreign hackers are already attacking the US power grid. But a Milestone Solar system with battery backup bank will keep your lights on 24/7 even if they succeed.

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This video report reveals how teams of hackers from Russia, China, Iran and ISIS have launched more than a dozen cyberattacks against the US power grid over the past ten years. All it takes is one success to knock out the electricity that lights, heats and cools homes; that keeps food fresh and cooks it; that pumps water from wells – for weeks, perhaps months, at a time.

A bimodal Milestone Solar system with a battery backup bank will keep your lights and power on 24/7, for as long as it takes for the grid to come back up again.

Unlike emergency generators, there are no moving parts to need maintenance. There’s no danger of toxic exhaust fumes. There’s no worry about storing flammable fuels or refueling, because your system will “refuel” with every sunrise – and store up enough electric power to last you through the night.

With federal tax credits and reduced monthly electric bills, a Milestone system with battery backup is a real money-saver when the power grid’s working normally. And it can be a real life-saver if a cyberattack ever knocks the power out. We’ve installed more battery backup systems than anyone else in the region, so call or email us about either putting in a new system – or adding a sealed, gel-filled battery backup bank to an existing one. We’ll be happy to answer your questions as we always do – with straight talk, not sales talk.

 

How much should an hour of electricity cost?

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8.8.12-Power-Outage

About 3 PM Monday, May 12, a substation equipment failure knocked out power in Cumberland, MD, and Mineral County, WV.

It wasn’t until 4 PM that Potomac Edison sent repair crews to the scene.

And it wasn’t until 7 PM – four hours later – that all 3,000 customers who’d been without electricity got it back.

Though backup generators kicked in at households that had them, their power came at a cost. Backup generators burn propane at the rate of four gallons per hour. At $4 per gallon of propane, that’s $16 per hour to keep the lights on and the refrigerator cold. For a four-hour outage, that’s $64.

Do the arithmetic, and you’ll see that for a two-day outage, like the ones that hit towards the beginning of this year, you could be spending $768 just for two days of electricity.

A battery backup bank, on the other hand, costs $0 per hour to keep your lights and your appliances powered. That’s because instead of costly propane, its “fuel” is free. It’s the sun, which rises every morning and powers Milestone Solar arrays even on cloudy days.

And adding a battery backup bank to your Milestone Solar system costs no more than a backup generator – sometimes less.

Click here or call us at 866-688-4274 to learn if a Milestone Solar system is right for your home or business. (Even the call is free.)

 

How to beat Virginia’s coming 5.8% electric rate hike

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If the State Corporation Commission approves two Dominion Virginia Power filings for rate increases, residential rates will go up almost six percent for some 2.4 million customers, starting September 1.

The bulk of that rate hike – 4.1% – would be to cover spiking natural gas and purchased electricity prices the utility paid to power homes during the record cold first months of this year. Another 1.7% is for increased transmission charges.

“When the price of natural gas goes up, customers get stuck with the bill,” Glen Besa, director of the Sierra Club’s Virginia chapter told the Richmond Times Dispatch.

But there’s a way to avoid what he called “gambling with their customers’ money with overreliance on natural gas.”

“There are no fuel rate adjustments with solar and wind power, because the fuel is free,” he said.

In Virginia, that “free fuel” is plentiful. Virginia enjoys more than 200 days with sunlight each year.

For the other 165 days, a Milestone Solar system with battery backup bank can store up enough solar-powered electricity for days at a time. (Which comes in very handy during outages.)

As a result, if you live in Virginia, instead of paying 5.8% more for electricity starting September, you can start paying up to 50% less, as most Milestone Solar customers report they do.

You’ll save even more with a 30% federal tax credit plus $1,000 or more with state and local incentives.

So why not get a free solar evaluation? It’s the first step in beating electricity rate increases – not only for this September, but for years and years to come.

 

 

 

 

 

FERC official: “We are now in an era of rising electricity prices.”

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A steady reduction in nationwide generating capacity in increasing electricity rates, according to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission member Phillip Moeller. “We are now in an era of rising electricity prices,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “If you take enough supply out of the system, the price is going to increase.”

In fact, electric rates already have increased – by double-digit percentages over the past 10 years, even after adjusting for inflation. If anything, they’ll get worse, says Daniel Kish, senior vice president of the Institute for Energy Research. “The trend line is up, up, up. We are going into uncharted territory,” he predicts.

One reason for that upward trend is unintended consequences of environmental regulations. When the Environmental Protection Agency wrote new rules on mercury, acid and other toxic emissions, they estimated in 2011 that these new limits would cause few coal-generated electric plants to close. But two dozen coal-fired plants across the country are already scheduled to be decommissioned. So when those regulations take effect next year, the power grid will lose some 60 gigawatts of generating capacity – the equivalent of 60 nuclear reactors.

Other generating units are replacing coal with cleaner natural gas. That’s great for the environment, but also costlier. Right now, natural gas costs $4.50 per million BTUs. But the added natural-gas electric generation, along with liquefied natural gas exports and conversion of truck fleets to LNG, will increase demand – and prices along with it. Malcolm Johnson, of the Oxford Princeton Program, predicts they’ll more than double, to $10.

If that weren’t enough, five nuclear reactors have ceased operation over the past few years (mainly because of technical problems), and more shutdowns are under consideration.

When extreme weather, like this January’s polar vortex, increases demand on a reduced-capacity generating system, rates spiral even higher, as the Times notes:

A fifth of all power-generating capacity in a grid serving 60 million people went suddenly offline, as coal piles froze, sensitive electrical equipment went haywire and utility operators had trouble finding enough natural gas to keep power plants running. The wholesale price of electricity skyrocketed to nearly $2 per kilowatt hour, more than 40 times the normal rate. The price hikes cascaded quickly down to consumers. Robert Thompson, who lives in the suburbs of Allentown, Pa., got a $1,250 bill for January. “I thought, how am I going to pay this?” he recalled. “This was going to put us in the poorhouse.”

But you can protect your home or business from the skyrocketing cost of electrical power with a Milestone Solar system. Our customers report electric-bill savings of as much as 50%. The fuel prices will never go up, because the “fuel” rises in the East every morning. There’s no maintenance cost, because there are no moving parts to wear out, and everything’s covered by a 15- or 25-year manufacturer’s warranty. And if another polar vortex comes along, adding a battery backup bank to your Milestone system will give you electric power for days, keeping your key appliances running until the weather gets back to normal.

 

“Electric choice flimflam” nearly doubles Pennsylvanians’ monthly bills

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It would seem like an April Fool joke, if only it weren’t so serious.

More than 9,000 electrically heated Lehigh Valley households have seen their monthly bills soar by 50%, 100% or more – and not just because of a record-cold winter.

As columnist Paul Carpenter describes it in the Lehigh Valley Morning Call, some alternative supply electric companies

suckered customers into contracts with all the guile of three-card monte or shell game flimflammers.

There were complaints they used telemarketing techniques to pitch variable-rate contracts, the main cause of steep increases in monthly electric bills, and then proceeded with binding “verbal contracts,” even when consumers insisted they’d made no such agreement, verbal or otherwise.
Other hucksters…targeted vulnerable senior citizens at community centers or church events to lock them into variable-rate contracts with promises of cheap electricity. Instead, monthly bills soared, with no quick way out.

A Nesquehoning couple, for example, said that instead of the 2¢ per kilowatt-hour savings they were promised, their $514 monthly bill shot up to more than $900, then up to $1,671.64 by February.

New legislation, Senate Bill 1297 introduced by State Senator Lisa Boscola, would let consumers to switch out of prohibitively expensive contracts sooner and would require suppliers to notify customers when variable rates are expected to rise 50 percent or more in a single month, to send 45-day and 15-day advance notices to customers before automatically switching them from expiring fixed-rate to variable-rate contracts, and to not start variable-rate contracts without “clear consent.”

That’s if the legislation passes.

But there’s a surer, perfectly honest and ethical way to lower your monthly electric bills, and that’s with a Milestone Solar system.

Milestone customers report electric-bill savings of up to 50%, month after month after month. Throw in federal tax credits m state and local credits and subsidies, and you may very well find, as one West Virginia Milestone customer did, that “Our system looks like it will pay for itself in about 7 years or perhaps a bit less.”

Best of all, in Lehigh Valley, with 204 sunny and partly sunny days a year – and statewide, with 2,021 to 2,984 average hours of annual sunlight – your savings won’t be seasonal. Your electric bills will go down even when the temperatures do.

 

All-time high electric costs make Christmas less merry

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Those Christmas lights on your house or tree spread holiday cheer, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics it’s at a higher cost than ever.

Their most recent monthly figures show that the seasonally adjusted electricity price index hit an all-time high nationally in November.

The average price for a kilowatt hour of electricity was 13¢ – the most one KwH of electricity has ever averaged since the BLS first started reporting average electricity pricing in November, 1978.

So one New Year’s resolution you might seriously consider is cutting the record cost of electricity with a Milestone Solar System. Homeowners who got one report power savings of as much as 50%. They also federal get tax credits and state subsidies that pay for between a third and half the system’s cost. (Talk about a gift that keeps on giving.)

Why not take a minute to click at the upper right corner or call 866-688-4274 toll-free for a free solar evaluation? It could be the start of a brighter, richer, happier new year.

Solar systems add $9,000 in home equity, Newsday reports

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Adding a residential solar electric system doesn’t just save on electricity, Long Island Newsday reported October 9. According to a Wells Fargo Bank/Journal of Appraisers study, home equity increases by 20 times the electricity savings.

“This increases the value of a home by 3-4 percent,” Newsday notes. “That would mean an average 5-kw solar system could add up to $9,000 in equity to the home it was installed on.”

Looking at the overall picture, the  increased home equity and the federal tax credits could pay for two-thirds of a typical home solar system alone.

And those savings don’t include state incentives, grants and tax credits. Nor do they include hundreds of dollars a year that utilities pay for Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs, which vary from state to state)  – nor the electric-bill savings themselves, which Milestone Solar customers tell us run about 50 percent each month.

So why not contact Milestone Solar for a free solar evaluation? You’ve got nothing to lose – and thousands of dollars in home equity and savings to gain.

 

195,000+ Maryland homes hit with electric rate increase

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If you live in Maryland, get ready to pay a 3.6 percent rate increase – retroactively. That’s the bad news.

But there’s also good news: You can reverse that rate hike, and then some.

As the Baltimore Sun reported September 12,

The Maryland Public Service Commission has authorized Delmarva Power to increase electric delivery rates by nearly 4 percent, the utility announced Wednesday.

The increase for Delmarva’s Maryland customers is effective for electric service rendered on and after Sept. 15. According to the company’s website, Delmarva has 5,342 residential and business customers in northeastern Harford County and 45,007 customers in Cecil County, among 195,000 customers in Maryland.

The rate increase will add 3.6 percent to monthly residential bills, the company said in a news release posted on its website.

The PSC also approved a Grid Resiliency Charge which amounts to approximately $0.03 cents per month, starting in 2014, for the average residential customer, the company said, explaining that this charge will cover costs associated with Delmarva Power’s plans to accelerate its reliability improvements by upgrading key equipment in the next two years.
Delivery rates cover the cost of poles and wires that carry electricity to customers’ homes and businesses and are separate from supply rates, the news release notes. Supply rates are determined by wholesale energy markets and reflect the cost of power that Delmarva Power purchases on behalf of its Maryland customers who do not buy power from an alternate supplier. Supply costs are driven primarily by the cost of fuel to make electricity.
Customers who buy electricity from a competing supplier will see the same increase in their delivery rates, Delmarva said.

But while Delmarva Power and its competitors are hiking electric bills by almost 4 percent, a Milestone Solar array can cut them by  more than ten times that figure. As Milestone customer Bob Myers, of Fayetteville, WV, told us,

“Our last power bill from just before we turned the array on was for $110 and a few cents. Our first power bill after system turn-on was $55 and a few cents. It cut our electric bill in half! That, plus the SRECs, plus the Federal and State tax credits, plus the proposed rate hike by our power company making our produced power even more valuable will provide a pretty decent return on our investment. Our system looks like it will pay for itself in about 7 years or perhaps just a little bit less.

If your home or business building is right for solar – and our free, no-nonsense Solar Evaluation will tell you that – you can stop paying more for electricity and start paying lots less. So why not call 866-688-4274, toll-free, today to get one started?

 

Pennsylvania Solar Rebates Restored

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There’s some exciting news for Pennsylvania residents considering a solar system.  The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has announced that $7.25 million has been allocated to fund the state’s Sunshine Solar Rebate Program.  The new funding  also incorporates some changes that will allow for a more streamlined application process.

Some of the details of the program include:

  • The new guidelines for a residential system allow an applicant to apply for $.75 per watt of installed solar system with a maximum of $7500.00 for a 10 kW system.  The maximum for a small commercial system (100 kW) is $52,500.00.
  • The new application process is greatly streamlined, and application will be reviewed and approved by DEP staff on a first-come, first served basis.
  • The program will close when funding is exhausted, or not later than December 31, 2013
  • As in the past, the program requires that the installation, and application for the rebate be performed by a DEP approved PV installer.  Milestone Solar is an approved PA installer — Installer #626

For more information on this program, or to schedule a free site survey and consultation please contact us directly by phone or email.  Our toll free number is 866-688-4274.