Springfield, Illinois is cleaning up from severe storms a couple of days ago. This article says that 36% of the city’s utility customers are still without power.
What does that mean? Springfield has a population of, let’s say 100,000 for simplicity’s sake (it’s closer to 113,000, but whatevs). Does that mean that 36,000 people in town are without power? Or does that mean that 36 percent of the people who pay the utility bill are without power - meaning the actual number of people without power is much higher, since it would include the members of the household of the bill payer?
A ‘customer’ must be a house (or apt or whatever a single meter is attached to) because the utility would have no idea how many people live in that house.
This makes little sense. If the numerator for the percentage is the number of customers without power, the denominator would be the total number of customers, not the total population. So if 36% of customers are without power, that would still imply that around 36% of the population is without power.
At least, if there’s no correlation between the number of people in a household and whether they’re still in the outage area. Which there might be, for a variety of reasons. But absent more knowledge, no correlation has to be the default assumption.
As others have said, but with concrete numbers for (I hope) clarity …
Springfield’s utility customers are WAG 5,000 businesses or government facilities plus 35,000 households. Of those assumed 40,000 power meters 36% of them or ~14,000 meters don’t have juice to them.
Whether it’s all businesses, all houses, or some mix is effectively random depending on the geography of where the outages are.
At least here in Maine, there is one “customer” for every meter. For reasons I don’t completely understand, our house and our detached garage have had separate meters since before we bought the place. We count as two “customers” even though we only get one bill.
I checked with my wife, who spent 40 years working for a utility. She confirms that “customers” equals “meters”. And confirms that what was said earlier is correct.
Utilities have no knowledge of how many people use the electricity that is metered. It may be for a single-person apartment or a family of twelve. It may be for a business or a government office or a factory or a farm. It may in rare cases be two meters for one person, extrapolating off bibliophage’s post. All utilities have to go by is the number of meters that are without power.
Although true, in context this comment just adds to OP’s confusion, since the utility company gave a percentage, not an absolute number. The hypothetical 36,000 was derived by OP using assumptions that confuse percentages of one thing with percentages of another.
I’m not sure that it actually matters at all. People use percentages all the time in ways that make mathematicians want to tear their hair out.
A store offer says 50% off - off what?
A reporter says there has been a 50% increase in something. What does that mean?
A reporter says 36% of customers are without power. All that means to me is that a hell of a lot of people are taking cold showers and having to buy their morning coffee.
Personally, I think that "more than a third" might have been a better description.
IANAM, but I don’t see a problem with any of your examples.
Off the presumed regular price. The regular price being represented might be a complete lie, but the intended meaning is clear.
It should mean that for every 100 units of something before, there are now 150. If the reporter and/or their readers are mathematically illiterate, it might mean something else to them, but that’s not the fault of the math.
As already said, it pretty clearly means that 36% of utility bill-payers, whether residential or business, are without power. Or IOW 36% of electric meters in the town aren’t metering anything at the moment. It’s not trying to make a statement about how many individuals are affected.
The 36% is presumably accurate, and is a reference to customers, not general population. Putting it in vaguer terms doesn’t help clarify anything.
Or the house’s service was already maxed out and providing electricity to the garage (especially if doubled as a shop of some sort) was simpler/cheaper than upgrading the house service and then running conduit to the garage.
A “customer” can also be a single billboard, a row of street lights, traffic signals, a railroad crossing controller (bungalow), or a telecom signal booster. If you look for them you’ll notice lots of electric meters on poles serving such uses.
Are you a Clevelander? I had thought that Cleveland was the only major city with two completely separate electrical utilities.
A lot of cities have multiple different companies you can get your bill from, but they all use the same physical infrastructure (transformers and wires and poles and so on) to deliver the power, so if one’s out, they’re all out.
And yeah, a statement about the percentage of “customers” doesn’t directly equate to a percentage of individual humans, but the number of humans affected could reasonably be more or less than that, and the simplest and best approximation (absent more information) is that it’s also 36% of humans.
Interesting that these are your go-to examples. I’ve only ever had gas water heaters, so while a power outage would have affected many things, my ability to take a hot shower wouldn’t have been one of them.
As for your other example: my mother lives in Springfield, Illinois and was without power for about a day, and the lack of coffee was the one thing she complained about.
