Electricity consumption will vary during the year so it seems fair to give the yearly total to have the actual cost; and you can divide by twelve if your prefer a monthly average.
Meanwhile, if they only gave a monthly figure, one could wonder if it's an average or if it's taken in January or July.
You don't pay annually, but because of the substantial variation in energy usage throughout the year, you'll generally price-compare on an annual basis, and usually the monthly payment is a kind of pro-rata value where you over-pay in summer and under-pay in winter.
This is how it used to be in Finland, too. More houses than in many other countries are heated electrically. With the cold winters here the variation is extra big.
Still since a couple of years ago bills have to be paid according to monthly (sometimes bimonthly) real consumption. I had the feeling this was even a regulatory requirement to make people aware of the real costs and encourage saving. Cannot find a reference to that now. Either I remember it wrong or the search results are just too polluted by marketing pages.
All meters are read remotely with hourly precision. An increasing share of households has spot price contracts. So the price changes every hour. Sometimes negative, sometimes 60 cents/kWh or more to mention the extremes. Switching to 15 minute pricing is on the way already
No, we pay monthly, but because we're a cold country that doesn't have widespread domestic air con, energy usage is _way_ higher in winter, so talking about monthly averages doesn't make much sense.
I was surprised to see how low electricity usage is.
The fairer measurement is probably gas and electric, and your source says ‘ According to Ofgem, the average British household has 2.4 people living in it and uses 2,700 kWh of electricity and 11,500 kWh of gas. This works out at 242 kWh of electricity and 1,000 kWh of gas per month.’
We don’t have gas at home and use about 10,000kW/h here in New Zealand.
This is an extreme outlier. I have a 4,700 square foot home in the Midwest, electric heating (heat pump + backup direct heat) and only occasionally hit $300/mo in a cold spell.
Heat pumps are something like 5-6x as efficient as resistive electric heaters. So no surprise that your bill would be lower.
Of course, heating an entire house with (non-heat-pump) electric heat in a cold climate is kind of crazy. Natural gas is way way cheaper. But I've seen it in old houses here in the Upper Midwest, so it's not _too_ out of the ordinary.
Heat pumps are so affordable now, that just feels like a poor decision-making rather than an economic hardship. You could finance a heat pump and the savings would pay itself off in a year.
That completely depends on local electricity costs and climate. We get about 4 months of freezing temperatures and when I did some back of the napkin math, a heat pump installation would be cheaper than gas over its lifetime, but it was only by about 10-20%, at a much higher upfront cost.
I'm not an expert so I could've made a mistake somewhere, but my calculations said that the system would have to survive for 10-15 years before it would pull ahead of a new gas boiler.
Yeah it's called apartment living. I hit nearly $350 in Oakland a couple years (and many PG&E rate hikes) ago in a 600 sq ft apartment. Even if I wanted to pay for a heat pump installation it's doubtful the landlord would've been on board.
Last time I did the math, even with a 60% efficient furnace natural gas was cheaper than an electric heat pump. PG&E's electric rates are simply that much more expensive than their natural gas rates. Currently that's up to $0.49/kWh on the most popular rate plan vs $2.49/therm. Keep in mind that the fifth and sixth electric rate hikes of 2024 were just approved today by Newsom's regulatory body and don't factor into the price I quoted.
I was also going to point that out. Resistive electric heating costs could easily reach that much, but it’s a horribly inefficient way to heat your house.
My first house was in the midwest, built around 1920, and had plaster walls with no insulation. It was only around 1400 sqft, but we did have (natgas) heating bills in that range ($600-$700/mo December through February).
