Why do energy companies promote energy conservation and efficiency?
My gas company gave me a free energy audit of my home, and offers generous rebates to install insulation and other energy saving products. I don’t understand why they do this. If I use less gas, they make less money. Why are they doing these things?
By the way, I won’t believe any answers that say "it’s the right thing to do", or "they want to be green". I don’t buy that. Profit drives almost all business decisions, and this doesn’t seem profitable to me.
They have a set price they can sell their product for. They have to go through a long process to raise their prices. By keeping the volume of gas for sale down, they don’t need to expand infrastructure which costs lots of money and would necessitate a price hike.
because they know alot of people are living green living
It is politically correct advertising.. The company creates a wonderful image so they get more customers. They are also gearing up for carbon taxes. or carbon credits.. ]]When a provider has spare carbon credits they can trade their credits on the market and make even more money than selling electricity, gas and so on. This in turn allows the energy that you have saved to be turned into another profit. Carbon trading so far is going to be a scam.What you do not use is used somewhere else..The cost of carbon trading is also going to lift the price of energy.. They will gain here to.
I think Thor got it right. With electricity production it costs a fortune to expand production so therefore it is better to get the best return from your existing customers.
1. Using less means that they can have more customers with the same amount of gas and infrastructure.
2. IF each customer uses less, they have a better chance of getting a rate increase to maintain their "profit margin" for the stock holders due to, "conservation reducing per capita income!"
Very simple even if you cut back they are still going to make money. There is no threat that they will lose money, the population in 1945 was 2 billion now it is 6.5 billion and modest estimates put it at 9 billion by 2050 even if we cut back there will be even more need.
Building new factories be it gas or electricity or whatever, cost and cause concern from customers where an evenly controlled need makes a steady profit.
By helping individuals go green they gain favor with government and also customers that translates into good will which in business generally means money. Even if it is so successful that the need goes down and the company starts to lose money, they simply would raise the cost to where they would make enough money to stay in a profitable business and government would have no problem with it and most consumers would have little problem with it. (If they showed you a way to only use 1/100 the power a week you use now and there would be no pollution and no power plants that people would have to live by how could you complain even if the price jumped 100 times as expensive. Because you would still pay the same but the resources will last longer and you will have less pollution)