Malta had the 10th-highest household electricity prices in 2017 when compared with a total of 32 other countries in the European Union and further European area, a new publication by the EU’s statistics office Eurostat shows.
For the first time, Eurostat published prices for electricity and natural gas that are fully comparable across country, saying in the report that with new data available the office was now able to calculate the weighted average price reflecting total household consumption. Previously, Eurostat used to publish the prices of a single band of consumption for electricity and for gas but, the EU body said, they were not the most representative bands in all the countries.
The prices for electricity and gas in the EU can vary according to a range of supply and demand conditions, including the geopolitical situation, the national energy mix, network costs and weather conditions, the report stated.
24 EU member states provided data, with Germany, Italy, Spain and Cyprus being exempted from doing so. Along with these, statistics from eight non-EU countries were used in this report. These eight countries are: Iceland, Norway, Turkey, Kosovo, Serbia, Macedonia, Moldova and Montenegro.
The lowest price for electricity per kilowatt hour paid by households of EU member states was in Bulgaria, where citizens paid 10 cents per kilowatt hour. It should be noted that Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia all registered rates lower than that. Belgium was the state with the highest price per kilowatt hour, at 28 cents.
The price recorded in Malta stood at around the 16 cents per kilowatt hour mark, a price high enough to place it tenth in comparison with the other 32 countries surveyed.
The household gas prices per kilowatt hour were also calculated by the same report. It found that the cheapest rate in the EU was to be found in Romania, but even cheaper than that rate was the one in Turkey. For this statistic however, Malta’s consumption of gas, along with that of Finland and Cyprus was deemed too negligible to be able to properly calculate an average price.