As a little light relief, but with some serious intent, we thought that a weekly quiz, or poll, or report from the front lines of light entertainment might amuse and inspire to some degree.
What Has really happened to energy prices ?
So, the eminently reasonable and diligent International Energy Association produce some very useful comparisons of national energy prices. (They were set up by the OECD in 1974 following the 1973 oil crisis.) Amongst these stats you can find loads of information about electricity generation, prices, taxes and uses at https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-product/electricity-information.
With a little bit of picking about this reveals amongst other things that something weird happened to the price of electricity to industrial users in 2020 and has remained weird ever since. There was a “tunnel of consistency” for many years leading up to 2020 when almost all countries except outliers Italy and Poland had fairly stable industrial electricity pricing between 5p per kW/h and 12p per kW/h. Then something happened and prices have been all over the place ever since. Guess what? The UK topped out the list at 26p per kW/h in 2023 while most industrialised economies chugged along at 13p-18p per kW/h and a few countries (NZ, Portugal, Czech Republic, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Poland) manage to get by with charging industrial users only 5p-10p per kW/h.
As a result, anyone who tries to make anything in the UK since 2020 has found themselves at an unsustainable economic disadvantage. Steel, anybody? Cars, people? Safety clips? (Safety clips are an economists’ joke, and those are precious few and far between!)
So the question of the week: “What the Hell Just Happened to the Price of Industrial Electricity?” And what do questions mean? Prizes! In this case, the unbridled joy of knowing you are informing and entertaining TWOP readers (and writers!) the world over.
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