Low energy

Privileged snot that I am, I've never paid attention to the size of my electric bill. Even during the years when we were genuinely strapped for cash (Danny out of work, me supporting the family on a freelance writer's pittance, our kids howling for brand-name jeans and various rip-off amusements), our utility bills weren't something we worried about. And now that our golden years are being subsidized by dead parents and the U.S. government, there's even less reason to fret about what we pay per kilowatt.

In Italy, however, we're forced to think about how much power we're using. Not what we pay for it, just how many watts we're sucking out of the system. (Or volts? Amps? I have no idea.) That's because electricity here is billed based on whether you're a frugal ant or a prodigal grasshopper.

Power is much more expensive in Europe than in the United States, and Italy recently saw another dramatic jump in energy prices, despite government attempts to soften the blow to Italian consumers. According to one chart I found, electricity costs last spring were over 60 percent more per kilowatt hour in Italy than in the U.S., and that was before this fall's increases.

Because power is pricey, while average incomes are low, Italians are understandably interested in conserving. Thus the government sets when you're allowed to turn your heat on, and for how long. In Italy's northernmost regions use of heat is unrestricted, but here in Emilia-Romagna we were supposed to wait until Oct. 15 to turn our radiators on and then run them no more than 14 hours a day. After April 15, we'll need to shut them down till the following October. 

However, we were happily unaware of this rule when we snapped the heat on early in October as temperatures started dropping, and I'm still not clear if or how this regulation is enforced. Which seems very Italian.

A long history of power parsimony is also presumably why most of the stores on our street go all dark as soon as they close, and why the lights in our building's hallways are on a timer (and a short one, at that--don't lallygag when going up the stairs!). 

The store across the street is so fancy they keep their Christmas lights on all night.

The same anxiety about cost no doubt also explains why when you sign up for electricity in your new home you're offered a choice between two levels of "potenza," 3 kilowatts or 6. Choosing the lower amount means your base rate is cheaper. But it also means there is a cap on how much power you can use at any one time. And it's not on the honor system.

Since there are only two of us, and since we weren't planning to run a pottery kiln in our Fidenza apartment or mine bitcoin, we sensibly chose the lower-price option. And most of the time that works just fine for us. But every so often we are forcefully reminded that our potenza has its limits. We'll be cooking lunch while finishing up the laundry when suddenly everything turns off--the oven, the dryer, the lights. We have hit our potenza's upper limit and the juice to our whole apartment has cut off.

The first few times this happened we assumed it was a building-wide or neighborhood blackout, because why else would everything shut down all at once? But a glance our the window, and a call to our neighbor, revealed that this was our problem alone. And the solution is to go downstairs and through the courtyard to the older building that is the back half of our little condominium, feel your way down the dark stairs into the cantina, figure out which electric meter is yours, and flip the switch to turn the power back on. 

This way to the cantina.

You'd think we would quickly learn how to avoid this rather dramatic nuisance, but whenever we return here from the free-flowing energy paradise of California we apparently have to relearn all over again which combinations of appliances will cast us into darkness. The dryer and the oven are both offenders, but the induction cooktop, the microwave, and the electric kettle have sometimes been implicated. The truth is we're still not entirely sure what triggers our meter's fits of catatonia.

Guess which meter is ours? Attila, the resident cat, isn't telling.

Now we are talking about adding air-conditioning to our array of modern conveniences. In July and August the weather in Fidenza keeps getting hotter and muggier, and the same man who whines about the cool summers in El Cerrito has decided he can't endure hot summers in Fidenza. So far we've had three different climatizzazione experts come to do lengthy, loquacious surveys of the premises, and after some prodding one of them has actually coughed up an estimate. (The Republicans who are furious that American workers aren't hungry enough to take any job that's offered would have apoplexy in Italy.) This industrious fellow assures us that we'll need to up our potenza to 6 kilowatts if we intend to run the air conditioning.

It took several hours of fumbling my way through our electric company's website and then several attempts to get through to their information line to uncover the difference in price between the 3 and 6 kilowatt options. The monthly cost isn't that much more--approximately 11 euro (about $12.50) for the higher wattage, versus half that for what we have now. However, there's also a hefty 124-euro ($140) charge for making the switch, even though the electric company has to do nothing more than type in a few keystrokes in their office. 

I imagine the real surprise will be what it costs to actually run our new air-conditioning, once we get through having it installed, which promises to be a process rich in expense and inconvenience. But we're looking forward to having the freedom to cool the air in our apartment whenever we want, and as much as we want. At least until we bump into whatever the 6 kilowatt limit turns out to be.