That's seems to be about right. $550-$580 seems to be the monthly charges during the June-October period when its triple-digit temp time. It used to be cheaper just last year, but my electric provider hiked the rates this year. Mind you, during june-october the a/c is going pretty much 24/7 and never shuts down.

I saved a bundle going with a new efficient refrigerator about a year and a half ago. Dropped about $50 off my monthly electric bill. (The old unit was over 15 years old and cycling on more often than not) The monthly savings, I was enjoying have now evaporated with the rate increase. ;-)

My provider (APS) gets an A for effort though. Only four power outages in 6 years and three of those were do to summer storm lightning strikes in the area. In each instance the power was back up in just under an hour. I had more frequent (and longer lasting) power outages in San Diego, where it seem transformers blew with regularity and it took them half a day to get the power going again.

In San Diego (under SDG&E), I'd easily pay well over double that figure for the amount of electricity I use every month. At the beginning of 2001 San Diego was averaging 26 cents per KWH! Even today, if you use anything over "baseline" usage (an arbitrarily low amount of electricity) one's rates jump up to 19 cents per KWH!

The difference is clearly Arizona's production versus consumption. In 2003 Arizona produced 94 billion killowatt hours KWH of electricity and only consumed 64 billion - leaving Arizona power companies 30 billion spare hours to share/sell to California and other states that don't generate enough electricity for their needs.

Here's a good chart that shows the prices paid per KWH consumption for the various states.

According to the chart Arizona pays 8.91 cents to California's 13.98 cents and Alabama's 9.07 cents. Look at Hawaii! 23.31 cents! With Conn & Ma trailing in the rip off department at over 17 cents per KWH! Idaho is cheapest at 6.1 with WA being pretty cheap too. Fascinating stuff...

;-)