10% of households use 1/3 of our electricity

Last week we posted our Financial Times article on reverse pricing. We said this policy could double the marginal cost of energy without making households worse off overall. There would be winners and losers, and people asked us how many: the answer is about 2/3 of households would benefit, and about 1/3 would pay higher bills.

But here's what's really interesting: to get to this answer we had to crunch the data on 26 million domestic electricity meter points, producing the chart below as a by product. Wow. The top 10% of households use nearly 1/3 of all domestic electricity in the UK. The top 20% use 44%. For whatever reason, there are about 5 million households who consume up to 6 times the national average every year. So we really do need policies - like reverse pricing - that make energy saving more attractive for high volume users.


You can see the source data in DECC's Energy Trends, March 2009 (p24 and after).