In Germany and France the price is considerably higher than here, although there seems to be a tendency to convergance, with prices going up where it is currently low and vice versa.
A fair bit of the difference in price is due to tax. For example in Germany and the UK the basic price is much the same but we pay just 5% in VAT (the lowest in Europe) and in Germany tax adds 26% to the overall price.
It is also interesting to look at the difference between the prices paid by industrial consumers and domestic. It seems that in Germany the industrial price is close to the domestic price, even though industrial users have much lower tax there, in the UK there is no difference between the tax on industrial gas and that on domestic gas.
(1) Electricity and gas price statistic (EU) The first chart uses values read off from figure 13, in PPS which is purchasing power standard - so adjusted for the cost of living in different countries. However I got the inflation from table 14 which is in national currency, and adjusted the numbers to match the 2010 PPS figure. The second chart using figures for the industrial price from table 17, again adjusted for PPS.
(2) More UK gas storage needed to ensure integrity of supply from www.engineerlive.com
The Energy and Climate Change Committee at Westminster agrees that we have far too small gas reserves and are worried about energy security in general:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/energy-and-climate-change-committee/news/ukes-report-findings/