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Mr Milk said..FormulaNova said..
I think the dream for lots of people at the moment is 'cheap electricity'. It won't ever happen.
I wonder what the comparative value of electricity was back in the 60s. ie Price/kwh (including connection costs) vs hourly wage.
The nominal price was certainly lower, but almost nobody had anything more than a fridge & a fan to run.
EDIT Since no other idle fatherless fellow was going to answer the question, I did a rough search and dicey calculation.
In SA electricity cost 1.9c/kwh in 1966. The average wage looks to have been about $60/wk. The single aged pension was $676pa.
So the average wage now is about 30X what it was. My electricity costs 30.45c/kwh (lower at night), which is about 16X the 1966 price.
In other words, power is about half the price it was in real terms.
I sort of expected power usage to have fallen since the 70s or 80s, but then again, I have never checked. I guess AC would have taken a decent amount of power, but then again, bar heaters were common in the 70s and 80s too.
I think with CFLs, and then LEDs taking over, lighting surely must use less power than ever before. I remember that rooms would often have 100w incandescents, yet now I have a lot of light in a room with 4x 10w LEDs. The whole house is the same, so lighting usage would have dropped to 40% of what it would have been in the past.
Surely modern TVs use less power than the CRTs of the past?
You mention fridges. I am sure the older fridges seemed to run more, but I don't know if the newer ones are more efficient or not. Mechanical cooling has changed, but probably just the type of gasses more than any significant efficiency improvements.
I guess insulation may have reduced energy usage too, but I also suspect that people have gotten used to not feeling too cold or too hot.
So, based on your calcs that electricity is about half the price, why is it that energy costs seem to be in the media a lot now? Is it really the cost, or the need to go to renewables?
As for 'cost of living' I suspect that a lot of automatic "indexed to CPI" increases all over the board are the real reason that everything feels expensive. When people up the prices of services 'just because the CPI is this', surely it just makes the next inflation rate follow the previous one.