With an E-TOU-C cost of $4,290 you must be consuming around 13,000 kWh on an annual basis. I was going to say that the dehumidifier was likely not a major contributor, but after looking into the electricity usage for small portable usage they seem like energy hogs. If you have a 500W unit that is running off-peak from 12:00am-3:00pm (15 hours) that is 7.5 kWh/day, 225 kWh/month or 2,738 kWh/year. With EV2A off-peak pricing of $0.24699 that is $676/year. With E-TOU-C that would be around $963/year.
Move to Arizona?
Of course, TOU actually makes economic sense, since that is when the most electricity use occurs, resulting in greater chance of overloading the grid, and greater use of expensive generation that is turned off when less than maximum is needed. The biggest factor during the summer is greater air conditioning use during the late afternoon and early evening hours.
Since Cities keep getting larger, seems to me it would make better sense to build more power stations. If a grid can't handle when everyone has their AC on, then it was under designed. And if it can't supply enough power for growth, then stop building new homes.
Building extra power stations means that more capacity will be unused most of the time, meaning that the cost of such will be very high for each GWh generated by them. Higher peak hour use that necessitates these extra power stations is another reason why electricity costs more to provide during peak hours, and hence time of use rates make economic sense in creating user incentives to lower peak hour use.
I checked with my Kill-a-Watt meter, and the dehumidifier used 0.85 kWh in one day. Thanks for promoting me to look into it.
