BUDGET BILLING

By Heather Juzenas, Vice President of Marketing & Member Services

This winter was cold! It was much colder than we have seen in the past few years. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projected this winter to be +6% colder than last year, and this has proven true for our members. The Energy Cooperative powers my family’s home in Pataskala.

Our January bill from The Energy Cooperative showed 1700 kWh of energy use, compared to 1500 kWh the previous year. This increased energy use is typical for what we have seen from our residential members this year (+10% higher than the same time last year). As overall energy use increases, we also saw members’ budget billing amounts increase.

Budget Billing Basics

The Energy Cooperative has around 9,000 member accounts on our budget billing program. Budget billing divides the cost of 12 months of energy use into equal monthly payments. If you are part of our budget billing program, there will be months when your energy use costs less than the budgeted amount.

This credit builds to cover the difference when your energy use costs more than your budget. Paying more than your budget goes toward the account balance and does not change your next budget payment. The Energy Cooperative does not ‘true up’ your budget account like other utilities. Instead, we evaluate your budget twice yearly and determine if it should increase or decrease based on your energy use.

Leverage Smarthub

The SmartHub app shows your energy use by hour, day, week, month and year. This is an excellent tool for comparing your use to previous years. However, there is much more data available to you when you access SmartHub from our website. The web-based version lets you dig much deeper into your energy history! Here is a snapshot of my home’s use comparison showing how the temperature affected my energy bill.

The SmartHub website also includes a Usage Explorer that shows how your energy use changes with high and low temperatures.

Whether you are on budget billing or not, The Energy Cooperative offers many tools to help you understand your energy use. SmartHub is one of those tools, but we also have a team of dedicated (local) member service professionals if you need us! If you have any questions, give us a call at 740-344-2102.