Opinion ID: 2653912
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Electricity Consumption Chart

Text: The chart of the City residents’ electrical usage does not provide sufficient information to determine which residents, if any, were similarly situated to plaintiff Freeman. Many factors affect one’s electric bill: the home’s size; the home’s energy sources (e.g., gas, electric, solar, wood); the way that a home is built (e.g., 7 Case: 13-14610 Date Filed: 02/20/2014 Page: 8 of 14 the number of doors, windows, the type of insulation, whether the home faces east or south); the home’s location (e.g., further north, at a higher elevation); how a home is occupied (e.g., seasonally, only on the weekends, only at night, all day); the number of residents; the appliances used in the home (e.g., heat pump versus furnace, electric versus gas water heater); the characteristics of those appliances (e.g., the appliances’ ages, conditions, and efficiency ratings); efforts to conserve energy (e.g., programmable thermostats, turning off unused lights and appliances, maintaining lower thermostat settings in the winter or higher settings in the summer, using LED bulbs). Freeman provided no evidence that the residents in the comparison chart had homes with similar energy consumption. Moreover, even if the energy efficiency and consumption characteristics were similar across all residences in the City, the comparison chart does not compare electrical consumption for a specific time period or periods. Thus, the energy consumption comparison does not account for such things as the specific weather conditions on a given day, week, or month. Nor does the energy consumption comparison account for the season (e.g., winter versus spring). Without some evidence that the comparison chart reflects a difference in electrical consumption for people who are similarly situated in all respects but their race, the comparison chart fails to establish a critical part of Freeman’s federal 8 Case: 13-14610 Date Filed: 02/20/2014 Page: 9 of 14 claims—namely, that Freeman is similarly situated to non-black persons who were not overcharged for their kilowatt-hours of electricity consumption.