Smart Energy Solutions In the News

Shoppers at many Home Depot, Costco and Ace Hardware stores from Beltsville to Bethesda get $1.50 off a purchase of a compact fluorescent light bulb and $3 off on a multipack, thanks to the generosity of Pepco, say company officials.

But Pepco, like other utilities subsidizing stores for the discounted bulbs, is tacking a surcharge on ratepayers’ bills to recoup the cost of the program.

Silver Spring resident Homer Smith and other irritated letter writers to The Gazette don’t think much of Pepco’s generosity. The energy-saving bulbs are widely sold in other stores and Smith said he expected them to show up in discount stores ‘‘before long.”

They have. For example, Dollar Dollar Plus in Gaithersburg sells three 24-watt compact fluorescent bulbs — each the equivalent of a 100-watt conventional incandescent bulb — for $1.25, according to a store clerk.

On its Web site, the Dollar Store says it sells the 24-watt bulbs for 72 cents wholesale.

In comparison, with the Pepco discount, Home Depot sells a 23-watt compact fluorescent bulb for $3.47. The store does offer more variety than some discount stores, selling the N:Vision brand bulbs in three tones of light from 9 watts — equal to 40 watts in a conventional bulb — to 32-watt three-way bulbs, equal to 150 watts.

The swirly, screw-in bulbs are also available at another discount store, Family Dollar. Spokesman Joshua Braverman said he could not confirm a consistent price range at Family Dollar stores, but said, ‘‘Our bulbs are less expensive than what I find at big-box home improvement stores or local grocery stores. Our light bulbs are Sylvania so they are a name-brand product.”

Over its life, the new bulb saves about $42 compared with a standard incandescent, according to Pepco, as it uses 75 percent less electricity and lasts up to 10 times longer.

By offering the discounts, participating utilities in Maryland, including Pepco, Baltimore Gas & Electric and Allegheny Power, have stimulated wider use of the bulbs by consumers. The state Public Service Commission approved the discount programs, including the surcharges, while recognizing the benefits of increasing use of the bulbs.

BGE, which discounts the bulbs in some Costco and Home Depot stores around Baltimore, adds a surcharge of 67 cents to bills of each ‘‘typical residential customer using 1,000 kilowatts a month,” said spokeswoman Linda Foy.

BGE set a goal for its participating stores to sell 250,000 bulbs. As of Feb. 17, Costco and Home Depot customers had purchased about 950,000 bulbs, also discounted by $1.50 in the BGE program, Foy said.

Foy said the bulb program and other parts of BG&E’s Smart Savings Program announced a year ago, ‘‘tie in nicely” to Gov. Martin O’Malley’s challenge for the state to reduce energy consumption by 15 percent by 2015.

In Western Maryland, Allegheny Power got too aggressive, according to its customers and consumer advocates. In late 2007 and early this year, Allegheny mailed two compact fluorescent bulbs to each of its 220,000 Maryland customers, in a program approved by the PSC. Customers flooded the company with angry letters after seeing a surcharge of 96 cents per month that would essentially make them pay $11.52 for the bulbs over the course of the year. The uproar forced Allegheny to make refunds.

‘‘Mistakes will be made, as we saw with Allegheny Power’s recent light bulb program,” Johanna E. Neumann, advocate for the Maryland Public Interest Research Group, told the Senate Finance Committee last month. ‘‘Our utility companies need to get used to the fact that these programs are here to stay. It’s the PSC’s job to make sure programs get implemented properly and that utility companies, not the ratepayers, bear the cost of a flawed implementation.”