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When I open my billing page, I’m often asked “How easy is it to understand your bill?”, which I usually answer with ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.  I was reminded of this when I recently had a message from an acquaintance ‘over there’, who was bragging about getting a negative bill for electricity for the first time since installing a solar PV array last year. He has gas central heating. This is what he was so proud of:
  

COA = City of Austin, Texas

 

They use a sliding scale of unit rates, increasing with usage per month:

0From Residential Rates (austinenergy.com)]

 

So, all sorts of costs on top of the unit rate plus a standing charge ($14/month) equivalent to 37p/day. Apparently, the average household in Austin uses 10,200 kWh of electricity annually.

Apart from the surprise that this capital of the ultimate capitalist state has its utilities in socialist public ownership - which explains the charge for street lighting - I was struck by the complexity of the bill. Can you work out what the average household’s annual bill would be?

I’ll happily give five stars every time I’m asked about OVO’s bills from now on.

PS A propos of bills, I just fell over this:

Billing Awareness and Misconceptions Report | Utility Bidder

“Around a third of Brits say that they often struggle to understand their energy bills.”

 

Wow, @Firedog, that is undoubtedly a journey to try and follow. We have been doing a lot of work to simplify our bills to make them as readable as possible without detriment to the content they provide. One of the reasons that we love working so closely with the community is that we can ask for feedback and get some incredible insights. 

 

From my experience, I think billing should be introduced into school learning programmes (it may be now, but it wasn’t when I was learning). The first time that I saw a bill was when I had moved on from our family home, and it took me a while to get the hang of the intricacies of different billing platforms. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this.

 

This is all very interesting and will begin to be necessary to understand even more in the not too distant future. 
With my Time of Use (ToU) tariff and wholesale price tracking package (from another supplier), my bill is often some 30 pages long detailing each days pricing coupled with energy usage per half hour. 

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