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But wasn't your usage basically the same as his?
I still don't understand how the average Swede can use 30x as much electricity as you two.
The difference is, he is able to communicate his message clearly and established the context, so there's no confusion what he's talking about.
The only thing uncivilised about this is deliberately burning all that gas just to waste it and then trying to claim how good you are at reducing CO2 emissions.
I live pretty small, a single man in his twenties, first apartment, owned not rented, so it's not big.
However, I don't even turn lights off when away, and I work from home. So that's on like 18 hours a day.
I have the dishwasher on daily and the washer/dryer a few times a week.
I have my two-pair Sonos speakers, a big ultra-wide screen, my M1 Air & an M2 Pro. That's it really lol.
Oh, and a microwave.
I take long and extremely hot showers as well, but water is included in my fee to the BRF so it's not included in my energy bill.
Just to put these figures into perspective, I consider myself to use a lot of electricity.
For work, I have a beefy PC with a 5800X CPU and 3080 GPU. That machine spends most of its day with both CPU and GPU maxed out. I have 2 monitors plugged into that.
I have another desktop with a massive screen that is frequently switched on. I have two laptops that are always switched on, and at least one has the screen pretty much the entire time I'm awake. When I'm not working, the work PC is usually switched off (unless I've kicked off a specialised clean, which can take 3-4 hours) and the laptop downstairs is also plugged into a TV so I can browse the web and/or watch streamed TV.
I hate dark environments, so I always have at least 3 bulbs on even during the day, although they're energy efficient 8W bulbs.
I top up the charge on my electric car if I've gone to the shops (which I do probably 3-4 times per week).
My fridge is obviously running 24-7.
I use the electric oven most days, so typically 10 minutes warm up and 40 minutes cooking.
I have an electric shower.
I splashed out and bought an aircon this year as it was so hot.
All that, and my electric bill averages 270 kWh per month, it was 300 kWh the month I used the aircon a lot.
Seriously, WTF is the "average Swede" doing that they need 5.5x times the electricity that I'm using? If the answer is "running their sauna" then I don't have much sympathy if they have high bills.
I was outraged too at first! Such a huge waste, especially in these times of freezing and climate change. However, AFAIK you can't simply stop natural gas from coming out of the ground once you poked the bubble. There are 3 options: export it (which only makes sense with pipelines), burn it, or let it go in the atmosphere.
Export has been made a bit difficult recently.
Letting it go into the atmosphere is even worse than burning it! I guess that's why gas fields in other evil-but-friendly countries are burning sometimes. And to artificially control the price I guess.
So burning it is currently the "best" option.
I don't know why storing it is no option. Maybe it's the sheer quantity and the storage is already full?
And anyone who would've bought it, would have burned it as well. So for the environment it makes no difference.
On a side note: for many years now, I wonder why post-soviet russia still hasn't diversified their economy more. Relying mostly on fossil fuels, agricultural goods, military equipment and some elements/chemicals (metals, fertilizers etc.) sounds ok for a while, but in the long run? IMHO, just like europe, they lack a multi-decade masterplan like china had/has.
Many houses in Sweden are heated with electric radiators. Houses that are energy renovated use a lot less electricity.
Large houses with old electric radiators can easily use a lot more than 1600 kWh/month.
You didn't mention any washer and dryer. They use a lot of electricity and are the most expensive appliances in most households.
That's interesting, and seems like an odd choice when electricity is nowhere close to being all produced from renewables or nuclear.
Not sure about Sweden, but in the UK, the price of electricity per kWh is about 3-4x the price of gas per kWh. Mostly due to inefficiencies burning gas to produce steam to drive turbines to make electricity that's then run hundreds of miles across the country along lossy cables.
If you want heat, it's far better to burn it locally where the heat is needed. In the UK, the vast majority of residential heating is gas, although about a decade ago storage heaters that use electricity at night when it's cheap and release the heat over the course of the day were popular, and we had a lot of split day/night tariffs. Of course, I wouldn't suggest moving to gas either if we know we're going to run out in 20-50 years anyway, so I guess it's an interesting problem.
Impressive numbers.
In country I live is household average around 5000 kWh/year. That's around 415kWh/month.
Even 415kWh/month seems a lot to to me, but average include also big families in houses, etc... not just appartments.
Many heating installations are old, so it is more of an old choice than an odd choice.
New and renovated houses have modern heating solutions.
Sweden used to have a lot of nuclear plants and low electricity prices. They are considering reopening some of their nuclear reactors.
Some interesting read about europe's energy market (read the whole threads!):
I noticed UK wasn't on that chart and googled because I thought we were connected to the EU grid. It seems we are, and in Q2 2022 we were a net exporter of electricity to Europe. And yet our electricity prices are higher than in Europe. Which curiously is exactly what someone was complaining about earlier (maybe it was @rcy026 about Sweden, but I've lost track).
Using gas for heating is pretty much non-existent in Sweden, I have actually never seen a house that uses gas for heating. I know that there are some small parts of Stockholm that uses gas stoves, but that is as far as I know the only direct use of gas in Sweden. We simply do not have any kind of infrastructure to handle gas, which I'm guessing is due to the fact that we are a big country with vast distances. In the north, where heating really is needed, the population is something like 5 people per square kilometer.
You are connected to the European grid, but you are not part of the EU. You can export electricity at whatever rate and price you want while we are forced to sell our electricity at a price dictated by EU. The problem is that when we really need our electricity, so does Germany and the rest of Europe, which forces us to sell it instead of using it ourself. This raises demand and prices go up.
The European power grid is a clusterfuck of epic proportions. Basically we produce a lot of cheap renewable energy that we are forced to export at a low price, and we import expensive "dirty" electricity at a much higher price.
That sounds like a crazy system. Surely you only sell when you have excess supply and buy when you have excess demand. At least that's how it works on a smaller scale in the UK for people with solar panels, farmers with windfarms, etc. Obviously you always pay more to buy it than sell it in this system (in fact in the UK, the price differential sucks, it's be better to use a massive local battery bank with maybe 20% efficiency than to sell it and buy it back later).
FWIW remote locations in the UK usually have either a massive LPG tank or a massive oil tank somewhere on the property. My friend has no gas supply and gets heating oil delivered, I think 500L or 1000L at a time .
It is a totally fucked up system. The idea is to "balance" supply and demand over time and over the entire continent. If electricity is cheap in the north and expensive in the south, you move capacity from the north to the south and everyone ends up on an average pricelevel. The problem is that everyone needs electricity at basically the same time which creates an extremely high demand and the prices go trough the roof. Everyone is talking about "spot prices" since the only interesting thing is the cost of electricity right now, this very minute. People get up in the middle of the night to do laundry and dishes, because its to expensive to do it during the day.
The whole system is such a complete and utter failure words can not even begin to describe it.
30-40 years ago this was very common in Sweden as well, it was basically the default way of heating houses outside of cities. Then all the green woke up and decided that burning oil is a bad idea, so taxes and prices basically made it impossible to use. My countryhouse used oil for heating, but 30 years ago it was replaced with solarpanels and a pellets burner.
I could recall that someone (perhaps you remember better who) always said that gas and oil from Russia must be cut off. And this was realized step by step in 2022 year. Moreover this promoted as good steps. So why you cry that Russia do not sell you gas or oil? And in any case this is not true because until now gas and oil sell into Europe. Through Ukraine, Turkey, as LONG into Finland, Japan and other countries.
Unfortunately, this is probably going to make Black Friday sales a little lacklustre this year
I have the perfect solution for the upcoming winter, in terms of heating.
My old gen intel Macbook gets so hot, I basically never turned the heat on for the
last few years when I'm working on my bed. A small side effect gone with M1 models.
Thousands of Global Warming scientists?
I'm quite sure any|all HP laptops would burn the M1's nuts off.
Regarding soaring energy bills:
The video at 0:37 shows a bakery's energy bill of the amount "1.093,25" (Euro), dated "26.08.2021". The video at 0:41 shows another bill of the amount "6.262,97" (Euro), dated "29.09.2022". "An increase of around 600 percent," as the reporter said.
I don't know how it is in other EU countries but somehow in mine the state owned electricity company made 358% profit last quarter.
Tell me again how is this not artificial crisis?
It's because the price (and I think this is all EU countries) fix the price to the customer at the cost of most expensive source, which is usually gas, regardless of how much electricity is contributed to by gas. In the UK where 60% comes from renewables and nuclear, at a much lower cost, the price is based as if it all came from gas. So when the gas price rises they make all that extra in profit. So a 6x rise in gas price produces significantly more than 6x rise for profits for other generators, whilst remaining break-even on the gas-derived electricity.
Stats: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267500/eu-monthly-wholesale-electricity-price-country/
Shows as high as 20x increases over the past couple of years.
It's worth pointing out in this thread the enormous moves in the forex markets right now.
The price action on sterling/dollar has been unbelievable the past few days.
I read an article earlier today about how the US is "exporting inflation" meaning the strength in the USD is causing commodity inflation in other countries who have currency that is declining in value relative to the dollar. Painful for all.
Prices won't go down for a while because the Nordstream pipe has been blown up
Indeed, EUR is in the toilet too.
The European manufacturing sector will be dead or have to move out due to high energy prices. Without cheap energy, perhaps it's better for the EU to focus on producing cheap and good agricultural products?
It is impossible having it to cheap. Because europe salary is higher than in other agriculture countries. As well as gasoline prices. But something which do not require high energies might be implemented within some time. But chemistry, metal, glass, plastic - all this is at great risk.
Some factories will have to shut down for a period of time during this winter when we need energy for heating. Simply because private homes are prioritized highest.
And the EU countries is working hard to replace the Russian gas with other energy sources.
This is only a temporary problem.
Prices will go down again.