The record cool temperatures in July did give some Iowans a small break on their electric bills. Temperatures in July averaged 68-degrees, the coolest in over 130 years of record keeping.
Ann Thelen the spokesperson for MidAmerican Energy, Iowa’s largest utility company says, that did lead to lower electric bills.
She says they dropped just about 2% for residential customers, which equates to $1.65 per customer. Thelan says the drop is bigger when compared to June.
Thelen says June had several days of 90-degrees or above and customer bills went up an average of 2.4% percent in June. So overall, bills in July dropped by over 4% compared to June. The average electric bill in July was $88.84. Thelen says the overall drop in electric use was probably not bigger because of habbit.
Thelen says there’s a certain percentage of people that are accustomed to running their air conditioners all summer, and probably didn’t deviate a lot from that. She says while temperatures where cooler, they were still in the high 70’s and 80’s. So she says there wasn’t a drastic drop in residential electric use.
Thelen says some customers have also probably taken steps to cut their electrical use through new appliances. She says new appliances and air conditioners are more energy efficient. Thelan says MidAmerican has an appliance recycling program and they’ve found that refrigerators and freezers built before 1990 use three times the amount of energy compared to newer models.
MidAmerican Energy is headquartered in Des Moines and provides service to over 722,000 electric customers from Sioux Falls, South Dakota to the Quad Cities area of Iowa and Illinois.