I sat down and calculated it costs them roughly a million dollars per year in postage to print and send those out.
I emailed the managers insisting they just put it online and use the million dollars to fund low income people from getting their power turned off and avoid the $50 fee to reinstate power.
All they would offer to do is take me off the mailing list.
If they insist on snail mailing stuff, they should only mail the worst offenders and radically reduce the cost. I use less than 200kwh per month in the winter and I still get those things.
The super stupid thing about those graphs is they include landlords with vacant apartments and houses that keep the power on for maintenance and easier new tennant move in (they just read the meter and change owner on the bill).
This is not really true - I worked for the company that generates these reports. It's true that the default product is snail mail, but this has been shown to be highly effective at driving down consumption and is a net savings for the power company.
Further, the company in question does A/B test various ways of sending the report, including email-only to find the most cost-effective way to drive down consumption.
Finally, the neighbor selection criteria DOES account for empty homes and other demographics, where that information is available.
Since I once got the report when I only used 150kwh and was saying there were other people more efficient than me, I assure you it's looking at vacant apartments and houses.
Also it's downright stupid to waste resources and postage to mail people who aren't offenders and can do little more to optimize their power use other than turning off the mains.
Just mail worst offenders, people above the averages and save hundreds of thousands of dollars on what becomes junk mail.
I sat down and calculated it costs them roughly a million dollars per year in postage to print and send those out.
I emailed the managers insisting they just put it online and use the million dollars to fund low income people from getting their power turned off and avoid the $50 fee to reinstate power.
All they would offer to do is take me off the mailing list.
If they insist on snail mailing stuff, they should only mail the worst offenders and radically reduce the cost. I use less than 200kwh per month in the winter and I still get those things.
The super stupid thing about those graphs is they include landlords with vacant apartments and houses that keep the power on for maintenance and easier new tennant move in (they just read the meter and change owner on the bill).