It’s the Canadian Electricity Association’s Electricity in Ontario week. Can’t you feel it in the air? A brochure, snappily titled “ELECTRICITY ARE WE GETTING VALUE FOR THE MONEY WE PAY?†[pdf] was in my dead tree media stack this morning. I think it’s trying to say our power is too cheap, as in this graph yoinked from the text:
But as ever, hand-picked statistics only tell half the story. Digging into the IEA Key World Energy Statistics handbooks for 2011 and 2012, the data look something more like this:
|
Country |
2010 Domestic Electricity Price / USD/kWh |
2010 Annual Electricity Consumption per capita / kWh |
Annual Cost per capita |
|
Denmark |
$0.356 |
6,329 |
$2,255 |
|
Japan |
$0.232 |
8,399 |
$1,950 |
|
United Kingdom |
$0.199 |
5,741 |
$1,142 |
|
France |
$0.157 |
7,756 |
$1,216 |
|
United States |
$0.116 |
13,361 |
$1,547 |
|
Canada |
$0.095 |
15,145 |
$1,431 |
|
Mexico |
$0.089 |
2,085 |
$185 |
So really, because Canadians use such an obscene amount of energy per capita (srsly; we should be ashamed of ourselves), the graph should look more like this:
So we’re not actually that inexpensive; solidly mid-range. Since our electricity price per kWh is so low, if we spent a little money on energy conservation, we could have really cheap power for everyone.
I believe the costs for Europe are the actual costs paid by the consumers while the price for Canada is not. The quoted price for Canada does not reflect cost of delivery, debt retirement charges and HST. If those are taken to consideration – it would be somewhat closer to Denmark actually and 2-3 times more expensive than USA.
Good point, Paul. All in, I pay Toronto Hydro ~18½¢/kWh