I’ve been hearing a lot about electric bike conversion kits lately and I thought it would be a good idea to check one out for myself. I’m a big bike enthusiast and I enjoy riding around the street in my neighborhood but I’m not always a fan of exercise. I thought an electric bike conversion kit would be the perfect way to turn my old bike into a motorized vehicle and I was right on the money. read more »
June 10th, 2010
What States Have the Cheapest Electricity?
If you have lived in different areas of the United States, you may have noticed that electricity prices vary a lot from place to place. For example, if you live in Hawaii, electricity is very expensive, because oil needs to be shipped in to generate most of the electricity there, and this costs a lot of money. However, you may be interested in where to find the cheapest electricity, so let’s take a look at the states that have the least expensive electricity.
At the top of this list is Wyoming, which has an average price of 6.05 cents/kWh averaged across all sectors. Why does Wyoming have such cheap electricity? I wish I could say that it is because there is so much wind in Wyoming, but the truth is that Wyoming gets 95% of its electricity from coal. At this point in time, coal is the cheapest electricity supplier, and there is a lot of coal available in and near Wyoming. Once a carbon tax is implemented, coal may become a lot more expensive, because it produces more carbon dioxide per kWh than most other sources of electricity, but, for the time being, coal-fired electricity is as cheap as it gets.
All but one of the five states with the cheapest electricity get most of their electricity from coal, but there is one exception: Idaho. Idaho gets 79% of its electricity from hydropower, which is also quite a cheap source of electricity. Hydropower is also renewable, but it is not necessarily environmentally friendly, because the large lakes formed behind dams greatly alter the landscape and destroy habitat as well as human settlements. As a result, very little additional hydropower plants are being built in the United States today, so it is not likely that hydropower will be used to reduce the cost of electricity in the future. Instead, we can look forward to relatively cheap electricity from wind power, and, as the prices of solar panels drop, someday we may be able to get cheap electricity from the sun as well.