Friday
Oct192012

Australian electricity prices (still!) low by OECD standards

Keith Orchison on Tuesday wrote about the little-reported fact that Australian electricity prices, despite having risen 50% in the last five years – see the draft Productivity Commission report into Electricity Network Regulatory Frameworks for more on that – are still amongst the lowest in the OECD (on a PPP basis).

That information comes from the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics via the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism, which Senator Xenophon’s quizzed on September 25th in the Senate Select Committee on Electricity Prices about whether Australians were paying above OECD rates for electricity. Here is DRET’s response [PDF], from which I excerpt the following answer and graphs.

Using a PPP measure, residential electricity prices in Australia averaged 12.66 USc PPP/kWh in 2010 and 14.20 USc PPP/kWh in 2011. Using this measure, Australian prices are well below the OECD average in 2010 and 2011.

OECD Household electricity prices 2010-2011, nominalOECD Household electricity prices 2010-2011, nominal

  OECD Household electricity prices 2010-2011, Purchasing Power ParityOECD Household electricity prices 2010-2011, Purchasing Power Parity

 (Purchasing Power Parity prices are the more relevant metric.)

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