| Indeed. You're quite right. And while it's certainly an unpopular concept to present, electricity right now is a whole lot cheaper (on average, in the US) when viewed through an inflation-tinted lens than it has been at many times in the past. I find that FRED (from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) is pretty useful for visualizing that kind of data, in part because it shows folks exactly what went into producing the chart. The citations and any maths are all included for inspection (see the "Edit Graph" link). It's hard to use FRED to present information disingenuously: It simply is what it is. For instance, here's a chart with one line showing inflation-adjusted electricity expense, in the US, over time: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NyKY And here's one that also adds several lines with raw data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NyNc (wherein: It can be plainly seen that the 1980s were very dark times indeed, and the first ~half of the 1990s weren't so great either. We're currently somewhere around turn-of-the-millennia in terms of how much our electric bill hurts compared to how much everything else hurts. (And none of this should be construed to mean that I'm ecstatic about paying my power bill or something. Everything is fuckin' expensive these days -- including electricity.)) |