Electricity Prices by Country
electricrate.com
electricrate.com
The USA leads the way in terms of household electric usage in the world – an average US household consumes approximately 975 kilowatt-hours of electricity each month, three times more than for example the United Kingdom.
Which got me wondering how big US domiciles are versus those in the UK. Turns out: lot of big-ass houses here in the US.
https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/how-big-is-a-house/
2164 sq. ft vs. 818 sq. ft
Which sure would explain that difference.
Air conditioning also uses the most electricity in a house, and the US has a lot more populated hot and humid regions than many European countries.
Seems like 40% of US households use electric heating though, which is way more than I expected.
https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio...
Edit: fixed link
But for overall household electricity use, air conditioning is 17% and heating is 15% (all houses, not just all-electric houses). [2]
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/homes.php
[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
Well, sure it is - and that doesn't look to be changing any time soon.
Alaska is colder, but: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/heat-pumps-alaska-oil-energy...
American dwellings being less well-insulated than British ones in aggregate absolutely does not pass the sniff test: British houses are older, and weather in the UK is much milder than in most of the US
I believe that it is similar for water heating.
In the US there is also a high percentage of houses that use electricity for the stoves and oven and for clothes drying. A brief didn't turn up how much electricity is used for those things in the UK, but if it is like much of the rest of Europe I'd not be surprised if it is lower than in the US.
In the US around 26% of houses use electricity as their only energy source, compared to around 9% for the UK.
Something that was interesting to me when I moved from California to central Oregon was that nearly everything was powered by electricity. I didn't even know anybody with a gas stove in Oregon.
I am guessing central Oregon may have been too rural for it to make sense to install gas utilities everywhere?
Midwest is a very common for most rural homes to have 500-1000 gal propane tanks. Propone is more expansive than NatGas but in cold weather it is still cheaper than resistive electric heat...
You might get a week or so during summer when it's quite hot but then a large fan is sufficient.
It was just the way things were.
Also, peoples homes have been redesigned for AC. The most obvious being people used to sleep on upper story “Sleeping Porch” in the summers. Those living spaces have almost universally had walls added. There’s many more subtle architectural changes that have gone away such as ventilation above doors, setting homes up for cross ventilation etc. Most of which simple doesn’t make sense in a world with cheap AC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_porch / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_room etc
https://www.weather.gov/tsa/wbgt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
This stuff can and does kill and if you're not aware of it then pay attention: this is one of the more direct consequences of climate change, it may well push zones that are currently marginally habitable right into inhabitable.
Meaning that a heating outage in a cold region would have a vastly more devastating effect than an cooling outage in a warm region.
Apparently about 68%. That shocked me. I thought for sure gas was more common based off personal experience.
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/29082/most-common-type-of...
And unintuitive enough that I get downvoted for pointing it out. shrug
However, when we are not on vacation the average is around 10 kWh per day.
Edit: We don't use electricity for heating or cooling (Sydney, Australia) as it's included with the apartment at a flat rate of 10 AUD (6.61 USD) per month
Electricity for cooking, but not heating.
My usage in 2019 was 1300kWh/year, but that was before regular working-from-home.
Maij reason is the stupid leasehold laws - in UK you dont buy apartments, you buy a lease on apartment for 100 years. And there is a landlord of the entire buolding. And they can make up tlrandom rules, like forbod you from owning a cat or fish.
Its lime tyrany of a medieval lord
There are old Victorian houses built for factory workers, although most of the smallest have been demolished: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-up_two-down
But they still build things almost as small now! [1] is wasting space on three bathrooms and a staircase, and has floor plans illustrated with what seems to be rather small furniture.
On the same development they have some apartments. [2] is poorly laid out (the long hallway is wasted space) but still manages to have more living area and costs £65,000 less.
[1] https://www.taylorwimpey.co.uk/new-homes/worthing/barley-gra...
[2] https://www.taylorwimpey.co.uk/new-homes/worthing/barley-gra...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35374014
Above is a link for many Canadian and US cities. The range is enormous.
Everything has to come out of that budget.
Unfortunately in the UK apartments are associated with the dirty poors, so people prefer to live in awful tiny houses over spacious apartments.
No they're not. If anything they're associated with dodgy leasehold, dodgy management fees and dogdy cladding.
None of which are usually issues in a house.
Otherwise there are a lot of luxury apartments.
"The chart shows the price of electricity for households and businesses in over 100 countries. The prices are per kWh and include all items in the electricity bill such as the distribution and energy cost, various environmental and fuel cost charges and taxes."
> Which sure would explain that difference.
The amount of stoves, fridges and washing machines do not scale with area though.
You would expect larger houses having lower power use per square excluding electric heating and AC.
[1]: https://www.directenergy.com/learning-center/what-uses-most-...
Food portions - you’re left wondering if you ordered one single meal, or one day’s worth. Shopping malls - I literally got lost at Macy’s in NYC. Cars - why are cars so big, especially the ones in cities? TVs are big. Even mundane stuff like glue sticks - they come in 3 packs, I can’t buy a single glue stick in most shops!! Most household items come in big packs.
Needless to say, all of this comically big items need space. So houses are big too!
The big difference is that in Europe in general it is much more frequent to directly burn something in your house in order to produce heat. Something almost unheard of in Canada for instance.
About 50% of the price per kw/h in Germany is set by an auction system. Electricity providers are bidding at any given point in time to provide energy for the grid. The lowest price per kw/h wins. BUT: because no one provider can satisfy the demand on their own, all bids that are necessary to satisfy the demand are considered and the final price is set by the most expensive bid within that range. So even if a wind turbine can provide energy at 9 cents per kw/h, if current demand requires electricity from a natural gas plant at 20 cents per kw/h, all providers within the bracket will get those 20 cents per kw/h from the consumer.
Natural gas has become quite expensive for the past year in Germany and for various reasons, natural gas plants are often the marginal providers in the German network.
The other half of the final price is split about 50/50 between the owners of the network and taxes.
Germany spent an insane amount of money, punished the use of electricity effectively (therefore undermining their own competitiveness in EVs), caused a significantly negative impact on household finances and industrial competitiveness (to the advantage of coal-powered China) and still only gets roughly US level of cleanliness in electricity. Because they simultaneously decided to get rid of nuclear power plants. shrug
It's interesting how Poland's electricity mix has been 80% coal for decades and this passes without comment, but what really enrages some people is a few nuclear power plants in Germany being mostly swapped out with solar and wind energy.
Doesnt seem like environmentalism is really the core issue driving this.
In ten years, Poland‘s electricity mix will be much cleaner than Germany‘s.
EXPORTS
In 2021, Poland exported $926M in Electricity. The main destination of Electricity exports from Poland are: Lithuania ($430M), Slovakia ($388M), Czechia ($56.5M), Germany ($28.8M), and Sweden ($23M).
IMPORTS
In 2021, Poland imported $1.45B in Electricity. Poland imports Electricity primarily from: Germany ($911M), Sweden ($299M), Lithuania ($131M), Ukraine ($63.4M), and Czechia ($43.5M).That’s simply untrue. Nuclear reactors are permanently maintained and improved, especially in Germany because of §19a Atomgesetz.
Nuclear power plants can run 60 years and longer. The nuclear reactor in Beznau went first online 1969 and it’s still operational. The reactors Germany is shutting down now went online in 1988 and 1989.
See also: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...
Those reactors were never designed to operate this long. As time goes on, you'll run into increasingly rare failures which weren't even considered during their design. Getting replacement parts is going to become increasingly difficult, as you're now looking for a replacement for a one-off part which was created decades ago by a company which doesn't even exist anymore. And you're missing out on six decades of innovation - including safety improvements.
Running reactors well beyond their original design lifespan is irresponsible. We are already seeing this in practice in France: in 2022 28 out of 56 reactors were offline due to technical issues or maintenance. 2023 saw a repeat of this, with 32 out of 56 offline at the same time.
If you want a stable supply of power using nuclear reactors, you're going to have to build new ones sooner rather than later.
Most of our nuclear energy experts are already 50+. New generations are told that the industry is shrinking (unless you move to the forward-thinking PRC).
Also, it's better to be down for maintenance even for small issues than to play fast and loose. Nuclear safety regulations and agencies are generally well respected, and those frequent maintenance downtimes are a sign of that.
Similar to what is being attempted right now with chip production, you could of course try to spin up all of this infrastructure and the required workforce with a ton of public investment. But why do that when you can build perfectly workable solar/wind power plants in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost? Even if Germany would end up importing nuclear power from France, Poland, UK, Sweden, etc. why try to spend a boatload of money and political capital on an industry that those countries are positioned infinitely better to run? (Given all of these countries' problems with nuclear, I doubt that Germany will end up net importer, but that is beside the point).
If people were presenting Poland as the model for environmentalism then that strategy would likely raise even harsher criticism.
Except they didnt. Unlike Poland they reduced the amount of coal they used by rather a lot.
While US media is extremely critical of Germany for "not reducing its use of coal fast enough" it is apparently entirely unbothered by Poland not reducing it at all.
This is the American media feigning environmental concern because Germany was less obedient than Poland in following American foreign policy goals.
Well to be fair, this comment chain was explicitly about Germany. There are lots of bad energy policies.
Not for Japan[1]. The truth is that after Fukushima, the pro-nuclear parties lost a few state elections, which caused them to panic and give up on nuclear. Today, even Japan is over it, but in germany no one wants to admit that mistake.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan#Post-Fu...
It's the same reason Iran, Sweden and South Korea maintain a nuclear industry despite it not being particularly economic for any of them. They all have geopolitical concerns that drive them to want to be able to manufacture a nuke at short notice.
Unlike with Sweden, South Korea and Japan we are told to believe that Iran is pursuing nuclear power as a means of being able to acquire weapons.
Germany does not get on iota of good faith on that. They knew.
Politically hard to ignore? Yes.
Practicaly hard to ignore? No. Germany doesn't get any tsunamis and even if it did, the consequences of a fukushima level accident every few decades are less bad than the direct pollution effects of coal, even ignoring the CO2.
The next nuclear catastrophe probably won't look like Fukushima or Chernobyl but I imagine it will happen partly as a result of skimped/badly done maintenance on a plant whose operating life has been extended a bit too far.
That's pretty much Fukushima. It was an old plant, older than Chernobyl by 6 years by date of commissioning. It was supposed to shut down in early 2011, but was granted an eleventh-hour 10-year extension in February that year. The earthquake and tsunami happened a month later, in March.
Granted, it probably wouldn't actually have made any difference as it would have been operating that specific month, but it was still a bit of a "he was only 2 weeks from retirement" moment. Unless actions like moving the backup generators uphill would have been done beforehand if it was known the plant was going to keep going until 2021.
Separately, that $800B cleanup cost is something some dude pulled out of his arse. The actual latest government estimate was $200B.
Which is almost entirely due to the radiation panic. For example the permanent evacuation (and subsequent need to compensate everyone driven out of their homes) was almost entirely of people in areas were they had aless that 1% extra risk of cancer. And the managers of the decontamination do things like spend years dithering over whether to just release a bunch of contaminated water which would increase locals yearly radiation exposure by under 0.04%.
But lets take those costs as a given. The developed world has around a hundred commercial nuclear reactors and has done so for more around 50 years. The vast majority of disaster cleanup is Fukushima. An extra $2B factored into the cost of each plant to deal with accident chance chance isn't going to break the bank given these things produce around 500B kWh during their life time, which sells on the electricity market for around $50B.
It really does. If you remove the free insurance and let the plants shoulder the full cost it renders an already extremely expensive enterprise completely financially unviable. Thats why governments gave liability indemnification to plants in the first place.
The $800 billion is about more than cleanup costs, fwiw. It also includes stuff like turning on coal power plants to replace the power produced by the dead reactor. It wasnt Japan "overreacting".
All of this has happened before and it will happen again and because appropriately priced insurance WOULD break the bank taxpayers will be on the hook next time. Again.
The latest nuclear bill in America focused entirely on extending the legal lifetime of existing nuclear power plants. Good thing Fukushima's demise wasn't about its age, eh?
I think what enrages people is that unlike Poland, Germany is actively going in the wrong direction. They are stopping all nuclear power, not just closing old plants. All scientific evidence points to this being a terrible decision.
There's an expectation that Germany has the means and governance able enough to avoid taking disastrous decisions when it comes to fields which are almost entirely technical and non-political. So it was a shocking development, especially coming from a conservative majority that most people would assume would be generally pro nuclear.
Converting the entire electricity production of an advanced industrial economy to renewable energy (without using nuclear) is quite straightforward. In case of Germany, a 2015 study compared various scenarios for how electricity demand will develop by 2050. The most expansive scenario assumes a yearly demand of 800 TWh, compared to roughly 500 TWh in 2021. [1] The additional demand comes from electrifying cars and heating, etc.
Demand does of course vary by time of day, but is virtually stable from month to month. Variability of renewable production is quite high, so let's assume that you'd need long-term grid-scale electricity buffers for about 30% of yearly demand. The most basic approach to this would be the transformation of electricity and water into Hydrogen when an excess of electricity is available and the reverse when demand outstrips supply. The combined efficiency of that process (electricity->Hydrogen->electricity) is roughly 50%. I'm actually pretty sure that by 2050 we'll have much better solutions available, but this approach is doable with current tech and has the added bonus of being able to be combined with a hydrogen infrastructure similar to how natural gas is currently used, i.e. for industrial processes and heating.
That would put total yearly demand at 1,040 TWh, which based on the efficiency of currently available PV and wind turbines [2] would require a total nominal installed capacity of about 1.040 GW (based on real world data from Germany, 1 GW in installed renewable capacity is roughly equal to a yearly production of 1 TWh. This will vary based on local circumstances, but Germany is not particularly bountiful in its renewable potential compared to other countries).
Currently, Germany has a total installed capacity of solar, wind and water power generation of about 125GW but I will assume that all these installations will reach their end of life before 2050 and will need to be replaced as part of this project.
At current prices for the installation of new PV (700,000 €/MW) and wind onshore/offshore (3,000,000 €/MW) and assuming a 50/50 split in installed capacity, the total investment for the required 1,040 MW would come to roughly 2 Trillion Euros over 30 years, or about 66 Billion Euros per year.
Divided by 800 TWh of yearly demand, this comes out to 8.3 cents (Euro) per KWh. This is comfortably below the 2021 average whole sale price of roughly 10 cents/KWh and in Germany would come out to about 20 cents/KWh for private consumers, compared to the current market average of roughly 30 cents/KWh.
Of course current energy production is quite heavily subsidized by the German government. If subsidies continue (or taxes on electricity are lowered), price per KWh could be reduced substantially.
This is of course only a very rough and simplified calculation. But it is straightforward and based on real world data, a pessimistic energy consumption scenario and current technologies. It ignores the potential for geothermal energy, biomass, imported hydrogen, long-distance imports of solar energy from the Sahara, or hydro power from Northern Europe, as well as likely technological improvement for generating and storing renewable energy. Looking at this, I find it hard to believe that absent a complete revolution of reactor design and cost-effectiveness, nuclear power will have any serious role to play in this, given its regulatory challenges, capital expenditure requirements, construction times and unsolved waste management issues.
[1] https://www.agora-energiewende.de/fileadmin/Projekte/2015/St... [2] https://www.smard.de/home/marktdaten
But actually it's a good thing.
The providers who (through investment and/or technological superiority) are able to provide cheaper electricity, make more money.
Capitalist progress engine at its finest!
If you are interested in my opinion, I'm perfectly willing to accept that this kind of auction system works efficiently and effectively under normal circumstances. But in this specific scenario, it led to consumer prices rising by about 130% due to a sudden geopolitical shock. I personally find this less than ideal and I would have preferred a system that provides a bit more stability, because electricity is a fundamental need. Price jumps of this nature were unheard of in Germany, so no one was prepared for them, either.
Wind and PV heavily rely on backup power plants. So building a lot of wind and PV increases the reliance on gas plants instead of reducing it.
Even the government’s own energy agency "DENA" makes this claim.
See: https://www.dena.de/fileadmin/dena/Dokumente/Pdf/9262_dena-L... (p. 28f).
That is a very long time into the future, with a very high uncertainty.
So to add 100% to the currently installed electricity generation capacity in Germany, the German government would have to spend less than 5% of its current annual budget each year for 30 years. Let's say 6%, if you add some money to switch out network components to deal with greater variability in network loads.
That seems very achievable, especially because of course most of this money will come from private investments, not the state. If required, industrialized economies could of course spend the required sums to build out their installed capacities by a factor of 2,3 or 5. That would reduce the need for base load capable producers drastically, as well as the need for grid-scale storage.
Diversifying natural gas imports and having more long-term contracts with other producers would have been slightly more expensive before the Ukraine war, but it would have drastically reduced the price jumps thereafter.
I know that lots of people will argue that wind and solar will lower electricity prices, but since these don’t provide reliable baseload, Germany needs to have lots of fossile power plants in standby.
These doubled structures make the whole system inefficient and expensive.
[1]: https://reddit.com/r/uninsurable/comments/12agamh/german_ele... [2]: https://reddit.com/r/uninsurable/comments/12dtygj/comparison... [3]: https://reddit.com/r/uninsurable/comments/12afq01/germany_ke...
What’s the logic here? Why not just accept bids in order of ascending price until demand is met?
This bidding system ensures that everyone can publish their lowest bid with no fear of losing out, and by doing so, it maximizes publicly available data so regulators and TSOs have a good idea of what is actually available and which investments are necessary.
Of course the US is huge so service levels vary depending on where you are.
edit: That date is engraved in my memory: https://jacquesmattheij.com/a-world-without-power/
The only one I can think of in Europe is the 2003 Italy blackout.
And that's just the major ones. I can't even imagine how often people in tornado/hurricane-prone areas must have to deal with blackouts due to the local electricity wires being on poles.
I already paid twice as much per kwh as my friends who stayed in France, that was the case since 2017
Since the Russian gas episode I pay 3-4x more
So whenenver I see someone say oh I pay 10c per KWh I don't know if that's just the posted figure or the actual amount they pay per KWh if they took their entire bill and divided it by their usage.
My bill in the US does split things up between the supplier (who buys the energy) and the infrastructure operator. By US standards it’s not too complex. I definitely miss the EU rule on advertised prices being all inclusive though.
There are a few tariffs without a standing charge, but I think that would be useful mostly for a holiday home, second home etc.
Normalizing prices to USD also makes little sense, as I don’t get paid in USD in either country. Normalizing to daily income makes more sense, even though that’s not a perfect measure of affordability (I pay more for electricity but less for internet/cell service, for example). A more interesting measure to me is how many people struggle to pay an average household electricity bill.
That said, I completely agree with other commenters that Germany’s closing of nuclear plants was a big mistake, if not from the energy pricing point of view, then from an environmental impact perspective. I can see a coal burning plant in the far distance from my office window, and I’d much rather that thing was shut down then the nuclear plants.
The southern regions, however, have quite good transfer capacity to export (to European countries), so those regions often have to compete with export prices.
What this means, is that the prices can vary significantly withing Norway. While we up in northern Norway paid around $0.0005 / kWh last summer, my relatives south paid something like $0.3-$0.4 / kWh. It's been a pretty big deal for the past years.
Our energy production is almost purely hydro, with wind and solar as very distant second and third source. All our LNG is more or less sold off to Europe.
Is that figure accurate? It’s so crazy low that it would lead me to expect the area to be saturated with aluminum smelting and other high electric consuming operations.
But those are very rare moments, and only last a couple of hours her and there. Not unique to Norway, but basically what happens is that there's huge amounts of downpour, coupled with little demand / usage - typically something you see in periods where people are away, and if the weather conditions are there.
I assume that everything is electric powered in homes in your area?
A typo, surely?
Apparently people in northern Norway got contracts for "normal" electricity. Due to the power grid and energy production the electrons there are however mostly from renewable energies.
Now here in Germany people have contracts with "renewable" electricity. This then works the way that German energy suppliers virtually buy the Norwegian renewables, while the Norwegians virtually buy the non-renewable from Germany.
Thus Germans think they pay for renewables and do something good, while Norwegians think "oh, all plants here are renewable all is fine" but in the end only the companies benefit.
It's also state owned.
From what I've seen it's the best combo of green and pricing in the world.
0: https://www.hydroquebec.com/residential/customer-space/rates...
100% hydro.
Zero emissions.
0.11 USD per kWh.
Owned and operated by the City of Seattle, not a profit-making corporation.
I moved to Canada from the UK and it’s still unbelievable to me how much cheaper energy is here.
If you’re renting a place you don’t even pay for gas. I have unlimited gas in my apartment all year round! I’ve never been so warm in my life.
I would highly recommend any young Brits reading this to seriously look at making the move. It’s amazing out here.
[1] https://app.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/rates-energy-use/el...
It seems like hydro would be cheaper.
The important lesson here should be that retail prices != prices.
Here are spot marked prices: https://tradingeconomics.com/france/electricity-price https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/electricity-price
It really is quite impressive to write a 3-letter unit with 4 errors.
Spot market prices is just whatever the price is in EU, since all the grids are connected and every country in EU must trade if they have surplus energy. It represent the collective supply and demand within EU.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
It bundles distribution and electricity prices. In NZ the wholesale price is the same accross the country (marginal pricing), but different distribution companies charge different rates.
* Price differences during day/week/seasons. Cold day? Electricity can be 2-3x higher than the day before. Lots of sun/wind? Price plummets. ...
* Price differences in regions. Norway, Sweden, Germany, those alone have huge differences in electricity prices depending on where you live.
* Pricing relative to economic output, i.e. GDP. Or household income.
There are surely more. This really strikes me as a propaganda page as the data is too oversimplified to be usefulfor real discussions, but enough to point to it to further an agenda. ("See, we shouldn't have turned off those nuclear plants, see how expensive electricityhas become!")
Why would it matter if people in Berlin pay more than people in Munich, or vice versa? Energy policies are generally national, so national data is the correct level of granularity.
Most of your criticisms seem to stem from a lack of understanding as to what the word "average" means.
And they already have a chart that adjusts for average wages as well.
So nothing whatsoever here strikes me as misleading or propaganda. Averages are a totally legitimate comparison tool between countries.
I'm actually curious just what you imagine this could even be "propaganda" for. Because it seems like just an incredibly fact-based neutral overview to me. I don't see any agenda at all, unless there's a sentence or paragraph I missed?
Except that that's definitely not what's shown here.
> I'm actually curious just what you imagine this could even be "propaganda" for
I did end the post with just that.
For example, Edison in SoCal publishes these rates: https://www.sce.com/residential/rates/Time-Of-Use-Residentia... ($0.36 off peak and up to $0.57 peak usage)
PG&E: https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra... ($0.36 off peak and $0.50 peak)
When comparing these to the German $0.39, it doesn’t sound all that bad and at least they are dealing with a gas price spike because of a war. What’s Californias excuse? Also, many California residents have to deal with the stupid “public safety power shutoffs” because of unmaintained/poorly designed aging infrastructure that causes wildfires.
The idea was to create competition for power generation to lower prices. What actually happened was surge pricing and higher prices.
"Average retail electricity costs in the 35 states that have partly or entirely broken apart the generation, transmission and retail distribution of energy into separate businesses have risen faster than rates in the 15 states that have not deregulated..."
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/business/energy-environme...
One of the many reasons I decided to move out of California was because of these thinly veiled cash grabs in the guise of benefit to the consumer.
The marginal cost of generating electricity is different than the fixed price of maintaining the local grid infrastructure serving your home
What I don't like about this setup is that there's little incentive to conserve energy, invest in solar, etc. On the plus side, whenever I get an electric car, my "gas" will be practically free.
The dataset they're supposedly using is:
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
Which has UK: USD 0.413 for households, 0.338 for businesses.
Neither of which have any relationship with 0.27.
In the Netherlands we currently pay on average ~0.40€/kwH which is about $44. That should earn it a place at the top of countries paying the most. According to the article, it's not even in the top 20.
And that's me low balling the 0.40€/kwH as for over a year now it has fluctuated between that and > 0.60€. And it's with energy taxes temporarily lowered, it would have been even higher otherwise.
It doesn't really expand on this either. It only says they have tons of natural energy resources. So when they say 0, do they just mean average people just dont have to pay?
As expected, with the correct numbers, countries without gas, oil or nuclear have comparable electricity cost(they buy it from the french, etc...).
Here's an example. Current published rates in our area:
https://i.imgur.com/CTiCLtP.png
The article quotes $0.135 average household rate for the US.
This is 100% meaningless. Even worse, I have no clue how (or why) one would take the numbers from our current rate (linked picture), calculate some kind of an average and then apply it to every calculation about power and energy. Again, meaningless and also inaccurate.
Regrettably, it seems lots of decisions are being made based on these averages of averages of averages. Things like "The average American drives <x> miles per day", etc.
I get it. Slicing data into smaller clusters makes computation and conclusions far more complex. This is hard to communicate, particularly to a non-technical public. I guess I can look the other way when it involves certain types of content. However, something like Tesla's Master Plan ought to be required to use more nuanced and technically accurate methodology before being taken seriously.
As I have highlighted in another thread, the Master Plan says nothing whatsoever about only using solar vs. only using wind at grid scale. Yes, both require storage. However, quick analysis easily shows that there might be a serious question to ask about whether solar makes sense at all (at grid scale, it makes sense on rooftops). For example, an area equivalent to 1 Hawaii for wind power would require TWELVE Hawaii's of solar. Again, some of the analysis suffers from grabbing onto averages and universally applying them to every data point, which is wrong.
It's mostly taxes and taxes being taxed additionally by other taxes, a good chunk of that was/is for transitioning to green energy and subsidizing home solar.
According to [1], about 75% of the price per kw/h in Germany is shared between the producer of the electricity and the owner of the network. As the market for electricity is completely liberalized, those can be any of hundreds of companies.
The rest, about 25% are various taxes and surcharges.
While renewable energies are responsible for some of the above average electricity prices in Germany, the recent price surge is mostly due to the high price of natural gas. Germany electricity prices are fixed by a system of auctions, where the demand at any given point in time is fulfilled by the producers willing to charge the least amount of money, but the actual price is set by the most expensive bid that is still required to satisfy demand. Due to the peculiarities of the electricity markets, this often ends up being natural gas power stations and natural gas has become crazy expensive due to Russia cutting off exports to Germany.
[1] https://strom-report.com/strompreise/strompreis-zusammensetz...
The price hasn't budged -- is that because it only reflects changes in gas pricing long-term, or is someone else pocketing the part the state used to take?
IMHO part of the problem is definitely due to shutdown of nuclear, rapid expansion of renewables while keeping costly (due to EU CO2 emissions trade) coal plants going. Most other countries used renewables to replace coal plants while keeping existing nuclear around. Germany did the opposite.
But the international comparison is not as simple as the power price, there's a lot of infrastructure that is subsidized by other taxes and not power price directly. Not that those are any lower in Germany.
Prices are also lower than in France, but not the residential prices which are affected by taxes and fees while capped in France.
One thing stood out for me, for the top 2 economies in the world, US and China. The energy price for US businesses = 0.150 $/kWh. The energy price for Chinese businesses = 0.093 $/kWh. I was kind of expecting 20-30% discount on energy in China. Factually, it looks like a 30+% discount. This, together with regulatory and labor laws, will make it impossible for the US to compete in manufacturing, and possibly in long-term large-scale data-center sectors.
Unless supply is higher than all possible demand that will always be the way, but people won’t actually tackle this because some old dear in a 5 bed house they inherited 50 years ago might have to pay their way
And yes, standard of living (in terms of how much house, doctor time, education time and plane you can afford and how much free time you have) has gone somewhat down since 1960.
Regarding doctor time, it's a wrong metric - it doesn't matter how much time your doctor spends with you, what matters is if they get you better. And there's been a massive improvement in care and results over the past 6 decades. Just the progress in imaging techniques is incredible. Back in 1960 we pretty much only had X-rays, which are good for bones and not much else (I don't think even the ultra-sonogram was used back then). Whereas nowadays, we have these multi-million sci-fi machines, which allow the doctors to see the soft tissues inside the body in fine detail.
[0] https://www.electricrate.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/elec...
EDIT: article does something similar to that: https://www.electricrate.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/coun...
Many countries have price caps set by the government, subsidies to keep electricity affordable, or weirder/more complicated schemes to finance energy production.
Uranium?
In Toronto, my marginal rate is probably around US$0.08/kWh, but my usage in a double occupancy condo unit with the connection fee works out to US$0.22/kWh on average.
One would hope that this just means I’m cross-subsidizing heavier users but in reality my metering provider is owned by a partnership in Bermuda. In reality, some ??? shareholders are raking it in on a poorly planned out government “green” project to meter small users.
Local grids are generally a fixed cost to maintain, if there was no base charge your neighbors would be subsidizing the maintenance of your connection to the grid. Separating fixed cost from marginal cost is the equitable solution in this case.
hot water is central and heat is effectively central, so low direct usage (so why meter) but not too far off the average for my building.
There are about a hundred units each paying a separate fixed cost in one building. Anyone that thinks the cost/unit is the same to light up 100 detached homes is crazy. But that’s how the government regulated the billing (guess what kind of housing the decision makers live in?), which is why the Bermudan partnership jumped in to collect the distribution fees instead of letting the local utility collect that easy money.
Sounds like you live in an apartment or condo tho with other heavy power draws like heat offloaded, which is rare these days. Most rental buildings here got rid of central heat and left each tenant to fend for themselves with inefficient baseboard electric heat.
* https://www.torontohydro.com/for-home/rates
† Mostly due to historical reason of early generator stations being hydro-electric (water falls), electricity is called "hydro" in many parts of Canada.
For most condo/apartment dwellers, and often smaller homeowners, they’ll pay less overall on tiered plans instead of time-of-day billing.
Factoring in the actual price people really pay, the rate is more like that of Barbados, Greece etc, right towards to most expensive end of the table.
Despite the essentially unlimited hydro generation possible thanks to the Great Lakes running through Ontario, there has been a huge push towards shifting generation to wind and solar as part of 'carbon emission reductions'. Prices have increased rapidly as a result and the Provincial Government now has to subsidize everyone's electricity bill in order to try and keep electricity affordable - the subsidies are funded by borrowing so build up huge debt burdens with little planning on how those will ever be repaid.
While we are definitely overpaying for wind and solar capacity, there isn’t enough of it to really justify the prices we pay (and arguably, solar performs best when demand is highest, so its cost-benefit isn’t as bad as many believe)
Of course, those are only the charges I've actually dug into. On top of this there is a "Transmission Charge Deferral Account True-Up Rider", "Transmission True-Up Rider", and "Balancing Pool Allocation Rider". Generally these changes are small enough that they're not worth the effort to dig into. There is also a $75/mo rebate applied to the bill, which is part of the government's affordability measures.
Finally, on top of all of that, there is the 5% sales tax which is calculated on the total amount before that $75 rebate.
I'm fortunate to be on a fixed-price contract. People who weren't had a portion of their power bill deferred and have to pay it back between April 2023 and December 2024. The catch is that current non-contract customers are stuck paying back their utility provider's deferral, which includes the deferral for customers who had charges deferred but since switched to a contract. This article[0] explains it better than I can.
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/9586632/alberta-regulated-rate-op...
Just had a look at my recent electricity bill. 35 UK pence per kWh that will be like 43 US cents at current rate. (not 27 like on the list) Not sure what it costs in Germany at the moment but that is well above 39 cents making Germany on top the list.
BTW, now one of the best locations for remote workers (economically and living standard). In some lists Buenos Aires is first [1].
Also the map of low-carbon countries looks a lot like a map of where it rains a lot.
I pay the equivalent of 13c/KWh in Australia, and that’s after recent price rises (thanks Vlad).
The rates we pay are disgusting given we import none of it and are one of the worlds largest exporters. (Gas and Coal)
Tasmania is 100% renewable and they pay as much as anyone else.
We have a mining lobby problem.
And yes, we have a mining lobby problem.
How??
Fed my usage data to the Victorian government’s comparison site. [1]
Switched to the cheapest offer, which was GloBird Energy. Went to their website, discovered a small further discount on my gas was available so switched that over as well. Took maybe 5 minutes, total.
Took my free $250 from the VIC Government for using their site (yes this is a stupid election bribe but you’d have to be crazy not to take it - you don’t have to switch suppliers if you don’t want to, just run the comparison).
Is this old data?
> data-center/electricity-prices-by-country/