đŸ§”on Electricity pricingâšĄïž

Been meaning to try & do some quick analysis on this for a while but recent media coverage - "Ireland having 4th highest electricity in Europe" has really prompted me now

(with Mrs Coleman out, the kids in bed & it raining outside - no better time!)
First off, these recent news articles relate to recently published statistics from the EU's Statistical Unit 'EuroStat'. The specific analysis relates to household electricity prices in 2nd half of 2020.

The paper and data can be found here👇

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Electricity_price_statistics#Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers
What always strikes me with any pan-national analysis like this, is that they never take into account the cost of living in the respective countries. They simply plot the cost of a particular item.
⏭Countries with higher costs of living always shown to have higher cost services
So this week when I read in papers that "Ireland has the 4th most expensive electricity in Europe", and the accompanying commentary of "knew it!, damn renewables pushing up my bills" , "Choo choo - gravy train Ireland", "wind turbines don't work" etc. etc. this really bugged me
So what EuroStat should really be doing in each of these pieces of analysis is plot another table for cost of a service relative to net (not gross!) annual income.

This gives a fair view of what the true relative cost of a good or service really is in each country.
Where do I get net average earned income across Europe? You guessed it! EuroStat!

They very handily have average net income for 4 different household types across EU

Net income is important as it's what the household actually uses to buy the electricity

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Wages_and_labour_costs#Net_earnings_and_tax_burden
So, for each of the 4 household types, I've worked out how much electricity could be bought with the net annual income these households brings home.

This gives the best representation of the true relative cost of electricity across the different member states

Drumroll đŸ„đŸ„đŸ„
First up is the 'Single Earner with no children' [envy emoji]

Graph below shows if he was Irish, and spent all his money on electricity he'd be able to buy 134,000kWh

⚠More importantly, this shows Ireland to be the 10th BEST in EU for electricity prices, relative to earnings
Next is the "One earner, married couple, with 2 children"

These fair even better against their European counterparts.

As the average bring-home pay is higher, they're able to buy more electricity, and now ranks EIGHT in all of EU.
The last two households have the same results, so to save a tweet I'll just show one: "Two earners, married couple with two kids"

Again, here we rank TENTH best

If I was a headline writer - "Ireland has 19th most expensive electricity in Europe relative to your take home pay"
So, glad I got that put to bed, and please keep this sort of analysis in mind when you hear or read any article about expensive pints in the pub, expensive bottles of milk, expensive cost of hair cuts etc. etc.

IT'S ALL RELATIVE

Thanks :-)
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