If you truly want to contribute to reducing electric use then focus on your big items, not small ones. Your A/C is the biggest hog. Set your daytime temp to 78 or more. If you don't do that than you're all talk and no action when it concerns reducing electricity usage.

If everyone reduced their consumption, the power companies would probably raise prices to cove lost profits!:shrug:

I completely agree with you.

We have motion sensing night lights in every room. I prefer to think of it as being cautious, not afraid. Expect everyone knows someone that fell and broke something, a hip, leg, etc. And never fully recovered at our age.

I prefer to not live my live in fear, but that doesn't mean I don't take precautions I didn't take when I was younger.

Why either/or? I don't know about other people, but I can do more than one thing at a time. I agree with raising your thermo stat. Anything above 72 is a good thing. Each of us can do their part.

Well, yeah, and in Florida FPL is fighting home solar. And for a good reason, they paid a lot of money to build out the infrastructure to get the power from their plant to your (everyones) home. The business model calls for amortizing that over a long period of consumption. If people reduce their usage and/or switch to solar then the power company is stuck trying to pay off the huge bill they incurred putting all those wires up.

However, they are a sanctioned monopoly, so we do get some say in how they operate, and we need to exercise that say by voting for forward people that are not in the power companies pockets. I know that is a pipe dream, but I can always hope.

The BEST electrical solution is distributed generation (houses with solar wherever possible) and the "power company" eventually being phased out and all those power lines removed and recycled.