Law & Lawyers

Nationally, American households’ natural gas bills averaged $439 in 2014. This is the latest estimate of the Labor Department’s Consumer Expenditure Survey.

This amount is actually lower than the average gas bills in six prior years. 

In 2008, when the average was at an all-time high of $531. In 2006, when the average was $509. 

On Tuesday afternoon, the Energy Department published electricity industry data for August. Among the thousands of values was this number: 155,863.

As in 155,863 thousand megawatt-hours. That was the nation’s residential consumption of electricity in August.

Residential consumption has never been that high in any month in history. 

August 2016 consumption is now number one. It beat number two, July 2011, by seven tenths of a percent.

December 2016's Producer Price Index, and its components, was published by the Labor Department on January 13. 

In the list of final demand, residential electricity was up just 0.6 percent in December, as compared to the prior December. While residential natural gas was up 8.2 percent. 

Overall, final demand goods - from pork to pet foods to pumps - were up 1.9 percent. Final demand services - from lawn equipment retailing to life insurance to legal services - were up 1.5 percent. 

The latest Energy Department data reports that home solar roofs generated 5,111 thousand megawatt-hours during the first ten months of last year.  This represents a 42% increase over the first ten months of the prior year, a hefty gain.

Yet, home solar roofs still contribute less than half of all the megawatt-hours produced by distributed solar.  And the power made by home solar is dwarfed by that made by utility scale solar that is four times greater (by more if solar thermal is included) and by utility scale wind that is thirty times greater.