Has It Ever Occurred to You That What FPL Charges is an Invention?

In my opinion, I don't use particularly much electric power.  The glaring example of the electric power I don't use is that I tend to run my central air conditioning on the less cold side.  And it's typically off completely from some time in October until some time in May.  I just leave windows open when I'm home.  I unplug things I'm not using, which reduces some weird phenomenon called phantom usage of electricity.

In 2010, I got an electric car.  I plugged it in at home, and I never noticed an increase in my electric bills.  The choices, I thought, were either that it took extremely little electricity to charge the car, or that the electrician who created the circuit for me did something wrong/illegal, and somehow created a new circuit that somehow bypassed my electric meter.  I parted ways with that car in 2014, and I never noticed a decrease in my electric bills.

In 2016, I got another electric car, and this time, I did notice an increase in my bills.  It wasn't massive, but it was there.  And this car was much more powerful and had a significantly longer range than the first one, so it took much more electricity to charge it.  Also, I had to have the terminal receptacle changed from what it was with the first car, and the strength of the circuit had to be upgraded from 110 to 220.  So I figured between one thing and another, there was some explanation for why my electric bills were now higher.  (It was still a lot cheaper than buying gas, but it was an increase.)

In August, 2019, I got solar panels.  This created a few changes.  One was that if the solar panels did what they were supposed to do, then I should be buying less electricity from FPL.  For all I knew, it could be a lot less.  Two other changes also turned out to be important.  One was that a company called SolarEdge would be providing monitoring for me, so I could tell from one day, or one hour, or one minute, to the next how much solar energy my panels were creating.  And it works, too.  For example, I can watch production go up over the course of a day -- and it stops going up when the sun "goes down" -- and production is very different on sunny days than it is on cloudy days.  The second change was that FPL had to replace my electric meter with one that transmits electronically to FPL (and doesn't ever have to be read by a reader).  And it's a two-way meter, that registers electric power usage for which FPL will charge me, but also electric power production (from my solar panels) which FPL buys from me, and which will lower my bill.  During every day, for example, I make so much electric power that I spend several or many hours only selling power to FPL, and when it's not sunny, which is most of the hours of the day, I'm only buying.

So, here's what happened to my electric bills.  Starting at the end of the summer, 2019, my bills went down very dramatically.  For three months in a row this past winter, my bills were $9.99, which is FPL's minimum charge.  Then, although my AC was still off, and my usage pattern didn't change (no one else in the house, for example), my bill was suddenly $10.05.  I'm not concerned about the six cents.  I'm just curious why there was any change at all in the bill, since there was no change in the usage.

Then, during this past month, I heard a rumor that FPL was lowering everyone's bill, out of courtesy, sympathy, or whatever, about the coronavirus.  And sure enough, my monthly estimate, which I can track every day because of my new meter, suddenly dropped to $7.12.  This is lower than FPL's minimum charge, but this was the generous gesture they decided to make.  For about two days.  At which point, the estimate went back to $10.05.  And during this period, because it was the end of May, and south Florida was warming up, I occasionally turned on my central AC.  For the past few nights, I've had it on, although not cold, all night in my bedroom.  But the projected bill, which can and does change every day, stays at $10.05.

So I don't know what FPL bills mean.  I don't know if they reflect how much power customers use.  They must mean at least a little something.  It's true that when I do something dramatic to increase or decrease usage, like plugging in a hungry electric car, or installing solar panels, the bill changes in the appropriate direction.  But I don't know if the amounts we all pay are real.  They should be, if they're increasingly automated, and don't depend on a reader to read or misread something, or someone to write something correctly or incorrectly.  But I can't see how these bills could be real.  They don't make sense.