Live data from Hacker News

Electricity Prices by Country

electricrate.com

201–210 of 312 posts

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#201
post #127
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

This seems to be true in the Boise Idaho area too. Our house was one of the few that had a gas stove.

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#202

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 w…

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, whi…

I _hate_ when saving the world from climate change becomes an accounting game for scum-of-the-earth MBAs to exploit while stuffing their pockets.

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#203
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).

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.

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now I know where to build my LLM focussed data-center

If only there was also a country where GPUs are cheaper by the same factor.

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#205
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.

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#206

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAIDI

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#207

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 ride…

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.

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#208
post #172
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up here in Alaska, heating your house with electricity would be asinine if you have any other option.

I think that’s only because it’s more expensive. Whether you heat with electricity or with gas/petrol you still need the same amount of energy.

Not if you use heat pumps...

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0.96 CAD per kWh just up the road here in BC. 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.

0.96 $CAD doesn't seem all that cheap.

[deleted]

Re: Electricity Prices by Country

#210

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 ride…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN