11/04/2019
Lock in Your Price for Power, Forever
How long have you been driving a car? How much did gas cost per gallon in your first car? You don’t have to tell me, just think about it. Now I can obviously be showing my age here, but I remember filling up at the pump for about $1.10 a gallon in my first mini pick-up truck back in San Antonio.
Now imagine if someone would have given me the ability to lock on my price at the pump forever at $1.10 a gallon, no matter what the price at the pump said? Then, after ten to twenty years just stop - stop paying for gasoline forever. Is that deal better or worse than the deal you have now? Can you imagine the power companies giving you a permanent lifetime rate for power that they would guarantee would never go up, ever for any reason, forever? Even if they did (they can’t), imagine the odds of them telling you that after a set amount oy years you’d just be done – forever!
Now teenage me might have scoffed at that idea and replied that I could just drive on over to the other side of town and fill up for $1.05 a gallon! Sometimes locking in your price at today’s rate doesn’t seem like it’s a huge economic windfall, but it really is. Prices go up and down in the short term, but in the long run they almost always go up. That’s just inflation.
You would likely take that deal for anything else in your life. Let’s say your family spends $15 a month on milk. Imagine the chance to lock in a price for $15 a month for a set time, then always have milk forever, the same amount as you do now, but having an end to actually paying for it ever again? What if you could do that with your cell phone, or cable bill?
Prices go up. I think we can all agree on that. So what we’re really talking about here is an insulation (or protection) from inflation. It’s pretty easy to look around and talk about things that cost more now than they did twenty years ago. Cars, homes, clothes, food all cost more now than they did in the past. We can go on all day thinking of things that have gotten more expensive, but it’s not as easy to go the other way around and name things that are substantially cheaper now than they were twenty years ago.
The ability to lock in your price for energy, especially here in Texas where the cost for power has been increasing pretty quickly lately, is very powerful economically.
But for some people that’s what buying a solar system for no money down can do. When you go solar in Texas without any startup costs you’re given a single monthly payment just like you have now – except that it can’t ever go up! You see when you go solar you no longer pay for power, you make power. Instead what you’re paying off is the equipment itself. So like your home or a car, you’re making a constant payment with a locked in price that eventually you will pay off completely! Then you have a lifetime of free power, all for about the same monthly price you pay now.
Lock in your price for power, forever, until it’s paid off completely and then never pay for power again.