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Electricity Prices by Country

electricrate.com

191–200 of 312 posts

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#191
post #68

France seems to be in a sweet spot: low electricity price and low CO2 emissions, thanks to nuclear power?

Household prices are meaningless in this context, because they are artificially kept low in France and sometimes are affected by taxes and fees elsewhere. Here are spot marked prices: https://tradingeconomics.com/france/electricity-price https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/electricity-price

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.

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#193
post #58

$0.14/kWh in the US? My goodness. It's double that in the Bay Area. There's a reason I invested in solar for my home. Also the map of low-carbon countries looks a lot like a map of where it rains a lot.

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

But surely you don’t expect the US average to necessarily reflect 1 datapoint? And likely outlier, at that.

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#194
post #84

One little thing that stuck out: 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-…

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.

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).

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#196
post #84

One little thing that stuck out: 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-…

It's so weird to use national averages here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35374014

Above is a link for many Canadian and US cities. The range is enormous.

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#197
post #84

One little thing that stuck out: 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-…

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.

Its lime tyrany of a medieval lord

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 used to die of cold, and so why not heat?

It was just the way things were.

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_porch / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_room etc

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#200
post #74

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. 0: https://www.hydroquebec.com/residential/customer-space/rates...

Same in Seattle. 100% hydro. Zero emissions. 0.11 USD per kWh. Owned and operated by the City of Seattle, not a profit-making corporation.

Not for long. All the environmentalists wanting to remove dams on the Columbia will send Seattle’s cost skyrocketing.
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