For 12 months in a row, electric bills have been 1.5% or less of personal expenditures.
Good news again this week. The Commerce Department announced February's numbers that build up to the nation's Gross Domestic Product, the GDP. Buried in the numbers, electric bills were just 1.44 percent of personal consumption expenditures.
Over two-thirds of the GDP is spent by and for individuals and families. These personal expenditures amount to around twelve and a half trillion dollars per annum.
Our electric bills in February cost us one hundred and seventy nine billion dollars, annualized. Still a large amount. But small in comparison to purchases of all consumer goods and services.
Our hot streak is now up to twelve months in a row.
For the past twelve months, March 2015 through February 2016, electric bills have been 1.5 percent or less of these expenditures. We can now say that this is at least a mini-era of cheap electricity.
Last year, in January and February of 2015, electric bills were 1.52 percent and 1.61 percent of expenditures.
This year, in January and February 2016, electric bills were 1.40 percent and 1.44 percent of expenditures.
That's eight percent lower this January, compared to last January. And that's eleven percent lower this February, compared to last February.
As we noted a month ago, households' electric bills as a percentage of their expenditures were at an all-time historic low during the first years of this century. That says a lot. The data goes all the way back to the nineteen-fifties, when Eisenhower was the president.
Electricity was no greater than 1.5 percent of personal expenditures for twenty-three months in a row, from April 2001 through March 2003. Then after a one-month blip, electricity was no greater than 1.5 percent for twenty-seven months in a row, from May 2003 through July 2005.
It was the golden age of cheap electricity.
If we keep up this hot streak, we could rival that golden age.
Number-crunching courtesy of the magazine for commentary, opinion and debate on utility regulation and policy, Public Utilities Fortnightly.
Steve Mitnick, Editor-in-Chief, Public Utilities Fortnightly
E-mail me: mitnick@fortnightly.com
