Oh and by the way we’re going to raise the electricity rate and all that, but enjoy your 6000nt.
You’re eligible yeah? I haven’t really been following the electricity rate discussion, but I don’t mind that so much (within reason).
They’re gonna “raise” it? It’s not a scalping operation. Tax payer’s gonna have to pay for it one way or another. At least this way people will actually pay for what they use.
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I’d be OK with that if wages were keeping pace.
Not including wages for people at TSMC in that calculation but the average person.
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Wages never keeps pace. Taiwanese employers will find every excuse to pay as little as they can get away with. You only get a raise if somehow the minimum wage is risen above your present wage.
And I bet many employers pay below minimum wage and “forget” to raise it.
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Yeah and that’s the point I was trying to make. Subsidies for electricity to help the common folk help out those that can’t afford it due to lower wages. I have no problem with that and increases are going to hit people like this disproportionately compared to a Tsmc engineer who won’t change their electricity usage whatsoever
This is why they avoid, or try to avoid raising rates for lower users, but if you use AC it is extremely difficult to stay under 700kwh per month. The only way is to basically not be at home (and therefore not use AC) majority of the time.
But this does not address those who lives in shared houses, who often have one electricity account that is shared between about 10 people, who all use AC during the summer. They will be paying basically max rate all the time, which with the raise will be about 7nt per kwh. This means even if you’re never home you can expect to pay at least 1000-3000 per month just on electricity. What’s worse is only the poor will stay in houses like this.
The solution is to gather everyone into one room and only air condition that room, but you can’t expect that from all the various residents living there. Of course the AC unit should be a more energy efficient one too.
Taipower needs to address this, but they can’t because the legal framework in Taiwan does not allow it at all. You cannot open your own Taipower service account on your own, it is extremely expensive and difficult and subject to approval.
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I remember seeing a few rental spots where there was a shared meter and I noped out of there fast.
Part of the reason is they don’t have a choice.
You are only allowed one Taipower account per house. A house being a legal address. The rules are complex. Basically because otherwise someone would get 10 accounts, and have them power an AC unit each, so that they are all paying the lowest rate with impunity. Problem is Taipower actually loses money until you are paying close to max rate… so this is necessary.
Plus in order to create such a house you would need a service upgrade anyways, because most houses in Taiwan have a 50 amp (not kidding here) service! This allows you to run about 2 AC units at the same time, anymore and the main breaker will trip. Forget electric car usage or even electric water heaters… Most apartments do not have the capacity for it. In the US everyone has a 200 amp service, if your house is older you might have a 100 amp service, and it doesn’t get less than this.
By the way biggest reason Taipower bills every 2 months is cost. Because they still have to pay someone to go read every meter in town. If it was every month they’d lose money. They could have sidestepped this if they had working smart meters everywhere, but they somehow choose not to invest in the necessary infrastructure for this.
Edit: I just saw this: 台電：房東若申設智慧電表 分租套房用電逾700度凍漲
Basically if the landlord gets a smart meter (which is provided free of charge by Taipower), then usage above 700 kwh will still be under the old rate, in other words, no rate hike. I don’t know if this will persuade them to do this though, as they just pass the costs to the tenants anyways.
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I just posted that same article, but there is nothing tenants can do about it, the landlord has to do this, and the incentives isn’t enough IMO. For one thing they don’t care about rates because tenants pay them anyways, and they also massively overcharge on utility rates and profit off of it, none of which is taxed by the way. The law doesn’t care as long as you do not charge over the max summer rate. That means in the dead of winter when the average rate is around 2nt (because of lack of use), the landlord can still charge 7nt and pocket the difference, and this is legal.
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You mean they would lose more money. They rack up huge losses every day.
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Taipower isn’t supposed to profit, it’s basically a government agency (not really but close).
That’s why the government started to subsidize new power efficient AC’s. Up to 5000NT$ per unit.
Yea I am wondering if I should get one, but the units are very expensive and I heard is actually not as efficient as they say.
Depends on the unit. I’m pretty sure if I replaced the 30 year old piece of trash in my apartment today, the cost of a new, energy efficient unit would be paid for in lower energy bills within a year. But I already replaced the POS, noisy as hell fridge that my landlord “gave” me, so I don’t want to start collecting too many things that I will drag out the curb if I can’t sell if/when it comes time to move, because my landlord can shove it.
I’m asking myself how much electricity does it save. I’m basically spending money on a new unit and throwing out perfectly good unit. I know people with inverters and their summer electricity bill is still very high. So inverters will probably be more efficient in some cases but it takes the same amount of energy to cool a given space, there’s no way around that.
And new inverters are very expensive, and if the electronic should crap out for any reason, the whole unit is bricked. There’s no off the shelf control units for those.
My house has of those split AC units, I think they are around 7 years old. Around mid April to probably September I have 1 or 2 units running for at least 16 hours a day, maybe more on some days. Anyways my electric bill has never been more than 3000.
Is that per month or every other month? My bimonthly bill in the summer was almost 7000, and that’s a single ac unit running 24 hours a day.
This summer I’m just going to not be home so my electricity don’t cost that much.
It was bimonthly.
I have never had one that much. During the summer of 2021 I was expecting I high electric bill as we just had a baby and the AC was on 24/7, but it never went over 3000, or if it did then it wasn’t by much.