The pricing of electricity, water, natural gas, and even telephone rates should more accurately reflect the specific current market conditions of supply and demand, as well as distribution factors, all of which can often change rapidly and affect the true costs of a utility. All these utilities should be priced in as much of a real time manner as possible or practical. Electricity, especially, should be priced not just daily, but hourly, which would be much better. The true costs of water and natural gas do not change anywhere near as fast as it does for electricity, so perhaps daily, weekly, or monthly pricing is sufficiently accurate to reflect market conditions.

To know what the cost of these products are at the moment of consumption, each user should be able to buy a real-time utility consumption pricing gauge showing the real-time price per unit of the product (gallon of water, kilowatt-hour of electricity, thousand BTU of natural gas, etc.) and the cumulative total cost of a customer’s consumption for the indicated time period.