Electricity — or more correctly, our electric bill — is the single highest cost of our Homeowner’s Association. At present we pay around $615 per month — over $7,300 per year — for the lighting in our neighborhood. Since we have 23 lights total, that works out to over $25 per month per light. The cost of our street lighting is over 30% of our total budget.
And the sad part is there’s virtually nothing we can do to reduce the bill.
Here’s why. When the developer established the neighborhood, he used a Duke Energy Outside Lighting service to put in the street lights. That service installed and owns the lights we have in place. Duke Energy required a 10 year contract with a set price to cover the cost of installing and running the lights. Basically, the developer had Duke Energy install the lights and left us to pay the bill over the following 10 years.
There are four groups of lights and four different contracts. One with eight lights started in 2015. Another with four lights started in 2016. A third with eight lights started in 2017. And a final one with two lights started in 2019. These contracts all run for ten years. After that time, they continue month to month at the contract rate.
Terminating the contracts before the end of their ten year term can only be done with a penalty of 40% of the remaining balance. Terminating after ten years can be done without a penalty, but since Duke Energy owns the lights, terminating the contracts means we’d have to find another way to have street lights.
There’s one more wrinkle — and one more bill, it seems. Astute readers would have seen that I’ve only accounted for 22 lights, not the 23 we pay for. The 23rd light is at the sign at the entrance to the neighborhood. It’s on a separate bill. There’s no contract, but we do pay around $27 a month for that light bulb.
