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.
I'd guess that a far bigger factor is that the US has a much higher percentage of houses the use electricity for room heating.
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.
It's technically uninhabitable. It only works because we have a lot of technology, similar to NL, the arctic and so on. There are a lot of areas in the world that we have essentially only borrowed as long as we can hold on to them but that are in most senses uninhabitable and hostile to unprotected life.
Is it uninhabitable? Maybe some specific areas in Arizona / New Mexico, the South Eastern US was already established States before air conditioning was even invented.
Yes, but not by these quantities of people. Critical infrastructure would be much harder to keep alive without AC and the same goes for the elderly. I would expect the average lifespan of the region to take a serious hit during a prolonged power outage in summer.
People dying of heat in the US tend to have other serious medical conditions so it’s unlikely to change overall life expectancy significantly.
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.
There are plenty of places where people live in hotter/more humid conditions. US dwellings and lifestyles are simply very badly adapted at natural conditions and the gap is made up for by expending energy.
"Uninhabitable" becomes meaningless if you dilute it to mean "you couldn't build a city-scale population centre here without some infrastructure". All cities need infrastructure!
Not to diminish your point there, but globally, it is cold that tends to kill the elderly, not heat. Despite being much less newsworthy, illnesses triggered by the cold kill about ten times more than heat strokes and similar health issues from excessive heat.
Meaning that a heating outage in a cold region would have a vastly more devastating effect than an cooling outage in a warm region.
Yea no. Been to Costa Rica many times and no one has AC. People aren’t dying on the streets. My brother in law lived there for 10 years with no AC and it’s hotter, for longer, than my home in the Deep South.
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.
Agreed. I would guess some desert areas might not be habitable but that's only a portion of a couple states. You can definitely live in places like Florida without AC.
I can see an underground metro requires air conditioning, but for most other things there are people in developing countries with higher temperatures who live without it.
Spot on it’s very hot where I am and I run the AC about 9 months a year. My house has 2 units. Even in the winter there could be hot days where I’ll need to run it.
>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.
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...
Not sure about that, it looks like overall energy consumption still is almost there times as high in the US compared to the UK: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
It may be worth to mention that in the UK, energy consumption seems to be particularly low, below the EU average.
Vast majority of people use electricity for stoves in the US. Electric is also common for water heating. Less common to use electricity for space heating except for the South and for auxiliary rooms.
Yeah, it’s actually weird, because of the role it has played in the culture wars recently, but gas stoves are actually kind of a “coastal elite” phenomenon. Most common around California and New York City (and surrounding areas). And becoming a trendy feature in high end homes.
And unintuitive enough that I get downvoted for pointing it out. shrug
I am using 1300 kWh per __year__ in Germany in my three room apartment, with an electric oven and cooker. That is a lot of electricity for a single home, even with electric heating.
That's really not that bad. Consider that my house - freestanding, about 200 sq meters - was using ~10000 KWh in 2020. I radically changed all that when the war in Ukraine started and the difference is huge, we are now negative with respect to the grid and still use gas but that will soon go towards a heatpump. Conservation cut our consumption (including own solar consumption) by roughly 70%.
I went on vacation for two weeks last month and unplugged everything except the fridge and one HP Microserver N54L and the apartment averaged a little over 4 kWh per day (~120 per month, ~1440 per year)
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
That looks like you need a new fridge. And those little servers can really add up, I had a Synology 12 bay NAS with a 12 bay extension up and running 24x7 and it consumed about 300W continuously.
Heating is not just air heating but the hot water and the cloth dryer too. I have these running on gas and in a hot month, when the water heating is pretty cheap and the furnace does not run at all, I still spend about 1000 cubic feet of gas (300 kWh).
I am curious about quintile statistics, or at least median. Domiciles are definitely bigger in the US, but I bet the mean average is dragged way up by the top 20% of houses.
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.
By far more energy goes to heating than air conditioning, but a lot of heating in the US is natural gas (or oil in the northeast), especially in the colder places. About 43% of household energy use is heating and only 8% is air conditioning.[1]
But for overall household electricity use, air conditioning is 17% and heating is 15% (all houses, not just all-electric houses). [2]
Until I started working in the energy industry, I never considered that even gas heating consumes a lot of electricity because of the blower fan and ignition coils. Our blower fan is 0.5 HP, which is over 300 W. The bulk of our electricity expense has been on heat, even though we have gas heat!
Good point, I've realized the same. My electricity bill increases a higher percentage in winter than my gas bill. Our house has two furnaces and they use a lot of electricity
I guess that is true, I just imagined so few domiciles actually use electric heating, or use electric heating in places that do not get really cold, that it is not a significant factor in national statistics of electricity usage.
Seems like 40% of US households use electric heating though, which is way more than I expected.
Unfortuntately not. In 2015 35% of homes used electric heating, with only 12% (34% of electric homes) using heat pumps [1]. So the majority of electric heating is actually resistive electric.
Is that an average? I had no idea it was that small in the Uk. I mean, what is the point of a house at that size? It just seems like it might as well be an apartment unit .
I've been saying the same thing to anyone who would listen - 80 sq meter paaprtment is much nicer than an equivalent terraced house, you lose like 15m2 to staircases, its a total waste.
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.
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.
That average is for all domiciles, so will include apartments - even studios. I would say a "standard" 3 bed house is bigger - usually 1000-1200 square feet.
Not only that, I used more heating in LA than in France (900m above sea level) because all the places I lived at had single pane windows that couldn't even physically close
Unless you live in a particularly hostile climate, house size alone won't change your consumption that much. Walls and floors don't draw power, appliances do.
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.
The site contains a link to the data source (globalpetrolprices.com), which says:
"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."
It will be a combination of the British climate, and the inefficiency of American buildings (large, poor insulation), equipment (little incentive to reduce energy use with better appliances, timers to turn off heating/cooling when no one is home etc) and lifestyle (clothes must be dried in a machine, not on a line, t-shirt-warmth indoors even in winter).
> the inefficiency of American buildings (large, poor insulation)
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
Climate control is by far the biggest single line item in home energy expenditure [1]. Hopefully in more moderate climates people can consider heat pumps and other more efficient technology to help with this.
When visiting U.S for the first time, the thing that strikes you immediately are the sizes. Everything is bigger, much bigger in the U.S.
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!
If you are asking yourself why prices in Germany are so high: It's mostly the price surge of natural gas after Russia cut off deliveries in retaliation to sanctions in the wake of the war against Ukraine.
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.
To think there were nuclear reactors already built and running perfectly fine in Germany. That were closed down presumably for ecological reasons. Burning coal and natural gas instead.
Imagine if they had been growing the nuclear instead of reducing it, it would have allowed to almost get rid of lignite and coal.
Instead it is still a portion.
(And solar and wind being intermittent you can't just have that)
Barely. It's not really much different. For the full year 2021, about 350gCO2/kWh in Germany vs 375gCO2/kWh.
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
They werent that many to begin with they growing increasingly expensive to run, were coming to the end of their lifespan and Fukushima was a risk that was hard to ignore.
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.
> They werent that many to begin with they growing increasingly expensive to run, were coming to the end of their lifespan and Fukushima was a risk that was hard to ignore.
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.
Of course you can. Just like you can drive a car for a million miles.
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.
If you close down the old ones before building new ones, you choke the industry.
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.
There is no nuclear industry in Germany. There are no domestic companies capable of or interested in building a new reactor. Of course there are plenty of physicists, but actual industry experts are getting old, as you yourself noted and I've read stories about nobody wanting to study the relevant stuff at university for more than a decade now. The talent pipeline has run dry years ago.
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).
People generally present Germany strategy as a major role model for the best and most effective way to combat climate change. As such this strategy raises a lot of criticism when they start to burn coal.
If people were presenting Poland as the model for environmentalism then that strategy would likely raise even harsher criticism.
>As such this strategy raises a lot of criticism when they start to burn coal.
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.
Poland's coal use is also a huge problem. However, they don't receive as much comment because Germany is richer, so more able to afford cleaner energy sources, and Poland wasn't ignorant and short-sighted about using Russian natural gas.
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).
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.
Practically too. The $800 billion clean up bill also comes on top of the already gargantuan cost of building and maintaining nuclear power stations. It's a roll of the dice.
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.
Uh... We've seen that the cost of building, maintaining and decomissioning a 70s plant is around $6 billion ($4B + $1B + $1B approx) because this is something we've actually done.
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?
> 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.
Nuclear isn't being swapped out for renewables in Germany, it's being replaced by gas (in the best cases).
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.
Kind of my point. Germany's energy policy has gotten a disproportionate amount of attention and criticism in the US media for "not reducing its coal usage fast enough" for about a decade and this filters through to hacker news which discusses Germany's electricity system a lot and Poland's almost not at all.
Poland isn't a rich country LARPing as environmental saviour whilst increasing its coal consumption in 2022, after decades of being warned about reliance on Russian gas.
Germany does not get on iota of good faith on that. They knew.
> They werent that many to begin with they growing increasingly expensive to run, were coming to the end of their lifespan and Fukushima was a risk that was hard to ignore.
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.
Japan isnt really over it but theyve become increasingly focused on nuclear weapons potential after North Korea got nukes and started lobbing missiles over their heads. Their trust in the US nuclear umbrella isnt unlimited.
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.
tl;dr: A country like Germany could expand its current electricity production by about 50% while simultaneously phasing out nuclear and fossil fuels at a whole sale price for electricity below current market rates and with current technology.
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.
No, the main reason is Germany shutting down nuclear power plants and replacing them with fossil fuels.
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.
This isn’t the reason prices are higher. Even if Germany was using nuclear for most electricity, there’s a ton of gas being used in the industry and in homes (like for heating). Using non-nuclear power surely makes things a little more expensive, but it’s definitely not the reason prices are higher than (supposedly) anywhere else in the world.
All your claims are baseless and untrue.
Nuclear was replaced with renewables while also reducing fossil fuel use [1].
Prices are so high because of taxes and a lack of subsidies. Market prices are lower than in France [2]. Apart from gas prices, having to save France from its nuclear energy crunch was another factor for the rise in prices.
Because then, providers would try to guess the highest bid and bid $1 lower. As every bidder would miss once in a while, that loss would be factored in prices, and raise prices overall.
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.
Because then everyone with cheap production starts bluffing and bidding 19.99 cents and the end result is the same price but now the market is deceptive and unstable.
I don't know the answer, but this is known as a "uniform-price auction", as opposed to "pay-as-bid auction". There is a lot of literature on the subject. For electricity markets, things are complicated by the finite capacity of transmission links and lack of storage.
I don't think I provided any judgement whatsoever, I just described how it works and the effects it had in this specific situation. Both are correct as I described them, to the best of my knowledge.
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.
The German government relied heavily on the theory that gas power plants could facilitate the turn to renewable energies. In and off itself this was not a bad idea. But combined with getting 50% of all natural gas imports from a single (hostile) country it was a terrible decision.
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 don't yet know of a storage solution that wouldn't increase electricity prices by $0.60/kwh if we switched fully to solar and wind. Its actually much cheaper to just go full 100% nuclear and export your excess.
During this fall when journalist was interviewing every kind of energy scientists, the estimates landed around 30-50 years from now before those fossil fuel replacements will start to be built at grid scale.
That is a very long time into the future, with a very high uncertainty.
Little thought experiment:
- Offshore wind costs about 3 Million USD/MW to install
- Germany currently has 218,000 MW installed capacity, about 130,000 MW of this is already renewable energy, but let's ignore that for the moment
- So to add 218,000 MW installed renewable energy capacity you'll need 654 Billion USD
- Germany currently has an annual federal budget of 476 Billion USD
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.
Or you could just write that for exorbitant sum of money you get meaningless amount of storage. Additionally you need cash out that sum periodically because batteries has limited amount of cycles.
Yes, it's not as if wind turbine energy would be sold at 9 cents per kw/h if the system wasn't like this. The auction system makes it so that the best way to make money is to share information, which is a good thing.
I would add that part of the difference is service level between the US and Germany. In Germany the outages are far less frequent and for a lot less time.
Outages in the US are very rare. I’ve had three outages in the past 15 years. Two were just a second or two and came back on, one was for a few hours after a big storm.
Of course the US is huge so service levels vary depending on where you are.
On average an electricity customer in the USA experiences more the 20 times the interruption to service compared to one in Germany when measured by annual minutes of outage per customer.
2000/2001 California electricity crisis, 2003 Northeast blackout, 2011 Southwest blackout, 2019 California rolling shutoffs, 2021 Texas blackout. In Quebec over a million people lost power last Wednesday, and four days later over 100.000 are still 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.
What you are describing is mostly about market prices. Market prices rose also in the rest of Europe. The biggest factor really are the taxes. The market price for electricity is lower in Germany than in France, still consumer prices are much higher in Germany.
Even if you are a connoisseur of conspiracy theories, this comment is bullshit. The pipelines in question actually did not carry any natural gas at the time of the explosion. Both pipelines of Nord Stream 1 were destroyed but deliveries by Russia had been stopped well before that in retaliation to German/EU sanctions. One of the two pipelines of Nord Stream 2 was destroyed, but that project was never activated, due to a decision by Germany's government to cancel certification after Russia's attack on Ukraine.
There is currently no evidence whatsoever that the US was involved in the attack on the pipeline in any way. To the best of my knowledge, the current best lead is a group of allegedly Ukrainian nationals who hired a private boat and were in the area where the explosions happened during the time in question. Ukraine is denying any involvement (of course) and the people in question have not been apprehended. The only reasoning that currently points to the US is that they would have the technical capabilities and a motive, but that applies to dozens of actors, including Russia.
Biden made public utterances that falls within him admitting the USA would attack the pipeline, so that's at least some evidence.
But no matter who committed the terrorist attack, they for sure conspired to do it. The attack is a conspiracy by definition and by law, so any speculation as to the culprit will be a conspiracy theory - including your speculation that it was Ukrainians.
Okay so Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh is just a conspiracy theorist with this article where he brings all the receipts that the US blew it up? Where Biden, weeks earlier, literally said the USA was going to blow it up?
What I often notice when reading articles like this is people aren't aware of how electricity is priced in different countries. When I was in the UK I had one headline figure of price per KWh that covered everything. This seems to apply in a few European countries too. In Canada however I have a price per KWh and then about 7 or so different extra charges on my bill (local access fees, trasmissions charges, rate riders, distribution charges, administrative fees, etc). All the charges seems to be variable but not necessarily exactly variable based on my KWh usage. From what I've seen this seems to be happen in the United States too.
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.
I was going to post to say exactly the same thing. I recently moved Ontario, Canada to BaWü Germany. Yes, the kWh price is 3 times higher here, but I can find a contract where I pay about 9 euro a month for delivery, compared to $40 CAD I was paying (after rebates) every month on various fees back in Ontario. Most months I paid more for delivery than my usage back home. It’s nice to have the majority of my energy bill under my control.
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.
It’s been a while since I emigrated but my UK bill used to include a daily “standing charge” on top of the per kWh rate.
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.
The other variable in pricing can be time of use. Not all providers do this, but it can be cheaper to use electricity when it is in low demand and opposite when in high demand. I suspect this will become more popular as EVs gain popularity and change usage patterns.
Around here, prices even change depending on time of use. Peak hours start at 4pm when people start getting off work, and solar production starts going down. My price at peak demand is more than double my off-peak prices.
Norway (where I'm from) is somewhat complex, because the country is divided into five regions, and the northernmost regions have poor transfer capability to the southern regions.
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.
With Norway's energy there is some "fun" I learned about recently:
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.
> we up in northern Norway paid around $0.0005 / kWh last summer
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.
Fun fact: We've had negative prices, a couple of times. In which case you actually get money for the electricity you use.
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.
Without having studied the Norwegian grid, the Swedish one that it is connected to also experience negative prices som nights when there’s a lot of wind and we generate some 10 GW of wind power. Coupled with the nuclear plants in Sweden that still are online and we pretty much have an issue with too much being generated…
Then again things freaked out in the opposite direction when two of the plants went a offline, the wind was basically zero and we had freezing temps all over the country.
Hydroelectric power is pretty stable as a baseline but can only scale so much. At some point higher-cost energy would have to come online to meet demand, at which point the savings would be gone.
Dont forget to mention people living in the north dont love the idea of investing in transmission infrastructure as it will only make them pay more for electricity.
In July 2022, the average price I paid was 0.0192 NOK / kWh - so that's around $0.0018 / kWh. But that was the monthly average price, the daily minimum can be much lower.
I'm incredibly lucky to live in Quebec, Canada: 100% green hydro power at low rates. Tarif D has the first 40kwh at 6.509 Canadian cent/kWh, then 10.041 [0]
It's also state owned.
From what I've seen it's the best combo of green and pricing in the world.
I think they made an error converting cents to dollars, I just checked BC Hydro's rate and it's actually $0.0959 CAD (9.59 cents) for the first 1,350 kWh in a month (Step 1) then raises to $0.1422 after that (Step 2).[1]
The lines in front of my house were shorted by a tree, melted and fell, blocking my driveway. In about 20 hours the power was back, 2 trucks came and fixed the lines. I live in the countryside, so YMMV
Household prices are meaningless in this context, because they are artificially kept low in France and sometimes are affected by taxes and fees elsewhere.
The true comparison require a lot of data and work. One would have to first calculate how much subsidies that each government spend on energy production, how much tax money is spent on grid stability, how much the taxes are, how high the fee is for grid connection, and how much easy producer take.
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.
Thanks to that indeed, but the future doesn't look great, as little has been done in the last 20 years. So France will have to do a lot in the next decade, and that may change our prices.
There's a important lesson about using nuclear power as an energy source in there. Contrast that with Germany which is shuttering their nuclear power plants in favor of renewables.
There is no such lesson. EDF is going bankrupt, France is spending billions trying to replace reactors aging out and about 20% or so of the ~70 billion decommissioning costs are funded.
The important lesson here should be that retail prices != 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.
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!")
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
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.
This feels like a bit of a BS comparison. Consumers pay many other fees beyond wholesale electricity to actually get power. It would be much more useful to compare what actual households pay (for US by state probably rather than a meaningless average).
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.
In a word, deregulation. If you live in one of the 35 states that separated generation, transmission and retail distribution, your bill is about $40 a month more.
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..."
Business energy prices are even higher in the UK, because the government applies a price cap to retail prices but not commercial ones. Before some of the subsidies kicked in I heard of £1/kWh being common for commercial renewals, often requiring 5 figure deposits for many industries as the suppliers were worried about businesses going under and not paying their bills.
My electricity is rather cheap here in the US(Dallas). It's averages around 7-8 cents a KwH. The problem I face is delivery and b.s surcharges. It can easily double my rate to around 15-16 cents a KwH.
Isn’t that the case everywhere (in the USA)? Wholesale electricity is cheap, but you’ve gotta pay to have it delivered. If you’re a big enough customer (like a data center), you can pay near wholesale rate by building your own infrastructure to a large substation, but then you’re paying to maintain that infrastructure.
Some areas like Kelso and Longview, WA have 4 cent per kWh delivered rates, but your paying a meter base charge of tens of dollars a month, which makes low usage households pay more to remain grid connected.
The marginal cost of generating electricity is different than the fixed price of maintaining the local grid infrastructure serving your home
I'm in WA, and my rate per kWh isn't quite that low, but the fixed "customer charge" is high enough that it ends up being about half of my total bill on average. I get that the utility needs income to maintain the infrastructure, which is particularly expensive per customer in rural areas.
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.
Where oh where do these figures come from? UK. I pay toda, domestic tariff, USD 0.42 per pKWh. Plus 5% Vat. That ignores the Standing Charge of USD 0. 56 per day connection charges, plus Vat at 5%.
The article seems to claim a source of data, yet then goes on to publish conclusions wildly inconsistent with that source data.
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?
Percentage of a daily wage? What is the basis for these numbers? I am in an extraordinarily cheap part of North America in terms of electricity, but I can say that my costs are well above the 1-2% of my daily wage. And that is only the costs I pay in my monthly bill. Lord knows how much electricity I also burn at work doing my job.
For some reason publications about energy, including Tesla's Master Plan 3, insist on using averages to describe the entire sample. I think I can say this is universally understood to be a bad practice in statistics. The reason is simple: Central tendency indicators do not deliver accurate results when used in this fashion.
Here's an example. Current published rates in our area:
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.
Is the price in Germany so high because they made the somewhat rash decision to shut down their existing nuclear generation and move back to fossil fuels? Given their location in the world I'm guessing both solar and wind are marginal producers.
The 39ct/kWh are an artifact of the European gas crisis 2022, nowadays were closer to the still high 30ct/kWh as before. For a long time renewable energy was subsidized directly from (household) electricity prices. Same is true for grid investments, which are drastically rising, partly due to Windpower being produced in in the north and used in the south.
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.
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.
The EEG (surcharge on the electricity bill to subsidize the installation of both commercial and private wind and solar generation) has been phased out as of 1. July 2022.
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.
Thank you for the correction, I wasn't up to date with my information.
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?
Interesting site, with a great treasure trove of information. If you are looking for energy intensive activities, including manufacturing and data-centers, this looks like a great place to start.
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.
Living in Germany I can only say electricity prices are my least concern. Apart from the high costs for social insurances, the rise of rents and housing prices is what really cuts into your budget in Germany.
Rents increase to suck all money out of the system. The more you are productive and the more you earn the more the rentiers will charge.
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
The rise didn't take place I 1940, it was a gradual thing topping off around 1990.
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.
Are planes now more expensive than in 1960?? At least in Europe, flights were very expensive until roughly the end of XX century.
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.
In the US I suspect cheap and low quality appliances are source of a lot of wasted energy, which are the default in most new construction. My refrigerator runs ~75% of the time these days, despite my attempts to clean its exterior components. Its a pretty cheap model my home builder put in. I suspect it was intended to simply fail years ago and get replaced with typical family of 3-4 usage. But since I live by myself, my usage of it was not quite hard enough to trigger that failure. So it keeps on churning away, burning up the juice.
Too bad about that "share of electricity from low-carbon sources" chart[0] -- using a gradient of the same color makes it really hard to see the difference between, say, 80% and 100% when looking at the map... Would have been nice if they used a color palette with more contrast!
Prices of anything "by country" should be normalized by local average income. Ideally, for a fairer comparison, a good metric is "how many hours of work of a median citizen for each unity" of such a good.
That speaks to affordability, but not to why some countries just don't seem to be able to do it effectively, costing an order of magnitude more in some countries than others.
TBF price doesn't work well as a proxy for actual cost or efficiency either.
Many countries have price caps set by the government, subsidies to keep electricity affordable, or weirder/more complicated schemes to finance energy production.
Another complication with these numbers are the delivery/connection fees.
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.
In Alberta, I'm on a fixed-price contract for 8.69c/kWh. Add in the distribution, transmission, and local access fee charges and my all-in rate is actually 15.217c/kWh. But that's not all, there's also a 20.6c/day administrative charge.
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.
Is that the base daily meter rate or monthly meter rate causing the extra $0.14/kwh cost? Sounds like your using very little power.
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.
Yes, CAD$17 for the 190kwh itself and CAD$39 in fixed charges.
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.
Damn, your using very little power. All power use under thr first 500kWh is discounted here in Seattle, your not even burning half that in a month.
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.
† Mostly due to historical reason of early generator stations being hydro-electric (water falls), electricity is called "hydro" in many parts of Canada.
In Ontario the published rates also omit the 'delivery' fees and additional charges added on top (per kWh) which are unavoidable. The real rate actually paid is typically double the supposed rate.
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)
Article is a bit old or the prices got a lot higher in last couple of months.
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.
His remark is useful. If there is no electricity available, there is no price. You can also ban selling bread for above 1 cent and mark on your country stat your bread is 1 cent.. But nobody has bread
I don’t know anything about hydrinos, so I’m not qualified to evaluate your link myself. However, the Wikipedia page [1] has nothing good to say about that company. That video makes all my scam alarms go off.
That wikipedia page is rigidly policed by skeptics that pointedly ignore any and all progress especially over the last 10 years. You have to review their progress with an independent mind and evaluate what they have achieved on its merits.
I don’t work in physics, nor do I have a physics degree, therefore I can’t evaluate the theory of their claim. I can’t find any reputable physicists backing the claim that hydrinos exist, in fact they all say that the hydrino state simply isn’t possible. I’d believe in this theory if they actually proved that they’ve generated all this energy or reputable physicists have backed hydrinos. Believing in it otherwise would just be faith.
Yeah that makes me question the data gathering methodology. The raw electricity cost in the Bay Area is about $0.14/kwh but the delivery cost is nearly 1.5x that so you're actually paying something closer to $0.39/kwh
Seem to be for businesses. Definitely doesn't tally with average consumer prices i recently observed in UK (higher than what I see here) and Italy (much lower).
True, but even taking the supply charge into account you still get nowhere near 26 US cents a kilowatt unless you’re getting 90% of your energy from solar. (Note to Americans - we pay maybe a quarter as much as you do for rooftop solar, not taking subsidies into account, so solar is super popular even with people who can’t otherwise stand “greenies”).
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).
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.