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NORTHWESTERN ELECTRIC COOPERATIVE, INC.
June 2017
Appreciating electricity a penny at a time Electricity is about the only thing you can buy and still get value for just a penny’s worth By Curtis Condon, editor of Ruralite magazine in Hillsboro, Oregon
I
’m old enough to remember when penny candy actually cost a penny. For a nickel, you could buy enough candy to rot your teeth out, as my mother used to say. But what does a penny buy these days? Not much. The
government can’t even make a penny for a penny anymore. Ac- cording to the U.S. Mint, it now costs 1.5 cents to produce one. About the only thing of value you can still get for a penny is electricity. You might call it “penny electricity.” No, I’m not kidding. Think about it. To make the math easier, let’s say the average rate for a kilowatt-hour of electricity is 10 cents. That is 60 minutes of 1,000 watts of electricity for a dime, so a penny of elec- tricity equates to 100 watts. It’s enough to power a 9-watt LED lightbulb—the equivalent of a 60-watt incandescent bulb—for 11 hours, all for only a penny. Where else can you get that kind of value? How many eggs will a penny buy? How much milk, bread, coffee, medicine or gasoline?
Gas has come down from its stratospheric levels of sev- eral years ago, but there is still no comparison to the value of electricity. For example, if a gallon of gas costs $2.50 and your car gets 25 miles to the gallon, you can drive 176 yards—about two blocks— on a penny’s worth of gas. I will take 11 hours of lighting for a penny over a two- block drive any day. (6545003)
The value is just as evident when powering things other than lighting. Take, for instance, your smartphone. Using the same 10 cents per kWh price, penny electricity allows you to fully charge your iPhone more than 18 times for a penny. You can charge it once every day of the year for about 20 cents total. Not impressed? Well, how about these other examples of what you can do with just a penny’s worth of electricity: power a 1,000-watt microwave on high for 6 minutes; run a 200-watt desktop computer for 30 minutes; watch 2.5 hours of your favorite shows on a 40-watt, 32-inch, LED televi- sion or 1.3 hours on a 75-watt, 75-inch mega TV. The examples are endless. We are fortunate electricity is such an excellent value be- cause we have a huge appetite for it. We tend to forget that. Electricity is not expensive. It’s that we use it for so
many different things: lighting, heating, cooking, cooling, refrigeration, cleaning, washing, pumping, entertainment, communications—even transportation these days. Few corners of our lives are left untouched by electricity. Unfortunately, we don’t always appreciate it. When our monthly electric bill comes, we open it and may complain about the cost. It’s a knee-jerk reaction ingrained in us as consumers. We don’t stop to think about the value we received for the money.
What can you get for a penny? 1¢ of electricity gets you:
► 11 hours of light from a 9-watt LED lightbulb
► 18 full charges on your iPhone
► 6 minutes of microwaving with a 1,000- watt microwave on high
► 30 minutes on your 200-watt desktop computer
► 2.5 hours of your favorite shows on a 40-watt, 32-inch, LED television
Early in my career, I had the pleasure to interview an elderly woman who vividly remembered the day electricity came to her farm. Her name escapes me, but I do remember she proudly showed me the worn, dog-eared membership certificate the co-op issued to her husband. “You young people will never know what it was like to have electricity for the very first time,” she said. “It was glorious. Nowadays, you take it for granted.” Her farm was energized in 1940. She said the price of electricity at the time was slightly less than a penny a kilowatt-hour—true penny electricity. A lot has changed since then. Wages and the cost of liv- ing today are a far cry from 1940, when the average annual wage was less than $150 a month and the average cost of a house was $3,920.
But one thing that hasn’t changed is the value of electric-
ity. In 77 years, its price has risen much slower than the rate of inflation. A penny in 1940 had as much buying power as 17 cents
today, which means the residential price of electricity— which now averages 12 cents a kWh nationally and less than 10 cents in the Pacific Northwest—is actually a better deal today than it was in 1940.
So to my way of thinking, the value of electricity is like the bygone days of penny candy, and it’s OK to indulge yourself a little. But, unlike penny candy, penny electricity won’t rot your teeth out.
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