A message from General Manager, Tom Wolfenbarger

Understanding Energy Demand & Purchasing 

You may not think you need to have an understanding of energy demand and purchasing, but do you ever look at your energy bill and wonder what it all means? If your answer to that question is yes, then you might be interested to learn how demand impacts your utility bill.

To start, it is important to understand how electricity is made and how it is delivered to your home.

Before Butler Rural Electric Cooperative can send electricity to your home, that electricity needs to be generated by Buckeye Power, our generation and transmission cooperative. Once the electricity has been generated, it travels over high-voltage transmission lines to substations, where the voltage is reduced to a lower level that is appropriate for local distribution. The electricity then travels over distribution power lines, through your service transformer, and finds its way into your home.

While you pay your bill to us — your electric distribution cooperative — we don’t actually generate the electricity you use. That is the job of Buckeye Power. Buckeye Power is jointly owned by all Ohio distribution cooperatives, including Butler Rural Electric Cooperative.

We do help determine how much electricity our members need to power their homes and businesses, and you play a big part in deciding how much electricity Buckeye Power needs to create in order to keep the lights on in our community. That is where the terms “consumption” and “demand” come in.

Consumption is measured in kilowatt-hours (kWh). Demand is measured in kilowatts (kW). A light bulb consumes a certain number of watts, let’s say 100 watts at any given time. That’s its demand. If that light bulb stays on for 10 hours, it uses a certain number of kilowatt-hours (in this case, 1 kWh = 10 x 100 watts) from the generation station producing electricity.

If you turn on 10 100-watt light bulbs in your home for one hour, you are still consuming the same number of kWh (1,000). However, you are placing a demand on the utility to have those kW available to you over the course of one hour, instead of 10. This requires the generation and transmission plant to produce more energy in less time in order to meet your demand.

Buckeye Power charges Butler Rural Electric Cooperative for the total kWh consumption and kW demand. Peak demand refers to the time of day when the demand for electricity is highest. This is typically during the evening, when families return home from work or school, cook dinner, and use appliances the most. Using electricity during this peak demand period often costs Butler Rural Electric Cooperative more.

Varying demand and consumption are the reasons your electricity bill fluctuates season to season and even year to year. Generating and distributing power can be a tricky and complicated business, but rest assured Butler Rural Electric Cooperative will always work to provide safe, reliable, and affordable electricity to your family.