It looks like my plan to “generate electricity and sell it back to the grid” has gone horribly wrong.
This is the subsequent bill from my electricity provider:
Previously the bill showed a huge decrease. It’s so dramatic it drops below zero, which resulted in a electricity bill of -$30.35 for the -434kWhs we used. Yes, negative.
I guess my electricity provider must have found out what I was doing and charge us back. The energy for the subsequent months are 360kWhs and then shot up to 1084kWhs, resulting in a bill of $121.54. All my effort has gone in vain.
In truth, there never was any plan or effort. All those were dramatisation by me. I must stress that the scanned copy of the bills have not been modified in any way.
In Victoria, Australia, the electricity bill comes every three months, and thus there is a meter reading every three months as well. However, the energy provider I use, Victoria Energy probably decided that any amount of cash is more important than no cash for three months, which is why they send me a bill every month.
This means that for the two months that there are no readings, they send bill with estimate amount of energy usage. This estimate is calculated from your previous energy usage. Most of the time they get it pretty close, sometimes they just suck.
The April bill shows how much they suck. Energy usage from January to March are all estimates. When they read the meter at 27 Mar, they saw that the actual electricity usage was lower than estimated, which is why they they deducted money for the month of April.
The sudden spike in this bill is not a overestimation however. Due to the cold weather, and some other reasons, our energy usage was actually that high.
Sorry, Mother Earth, I let you down.