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Comment by yuuuuyu | Hacker News Reader

This is overly simplified. A few aspects come to mind that have huge effects, in orders of magnitude:

* 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!")

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Yes, but these are averages so it shouldn't matter. Assuming this is total spent in all households over a year, divided by population, it accounts for all fluctuations in time and region. And at the end of the day, all that really matters is what you paid over the year.

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?

> Yes, but these are averages so it shouldn't matter. Assuming this is total spent in all households over a year, divided by population, it accounts for all fluctuations in time and region

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.

They do have a graph of proportion of income spent on electricity. I see Switzerland is near the top, but as you mention, there is quite a lot of variation by kanton here. Oth, one of the first i noticed moving here was how much cheaper electricity was compared to the uk

It's true is pretty much every large country that the rates will vary by region. The rates vary by geography and since long distance transmission lines are expensive and limited in capacity the prices will always be somewhat local. If you live in an area with lots of water flowing down mountains or shallow magma you probably have cheap power. If you live on an island your power is probably from natural gas or even diesel shipped in from overseas and costs a relative fortune.

As an aside, not sure of the exact year, sometime around the 2000s, uk made it possible to buy your electricity from any provider in the uk, despite living in cambridge, i chose swalec(wales), and they didn’t bill me for 2 years and then i changed address, in that case, uk was ridiculously cheap

Maybe it strikes you as propaganda because you disagree with what it seems to indicate?

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.

It sells values as averages that definitely are not.

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