On Tuesday, the Energy Department released electricity industry data for September. The average price for residential electric service was 12.87 cents per kilowatt-hour. For commercial service, it was 10.70 cents.

Let’s see how the price of electric service has come down, first ignoring general inflation, and then appropriately including it.

Ignoring general inflation, September electric service for residential customers was 1.2 percent lower than in September 2015 and 0.6 percent lower than in September 2014. 

The federal government reported last week that new single-family house sales were up 17.8 percent in October, compared with October 2015. 

Trends in sales of new single-family houses drive trends in sales of electricity. 

For every new single-family house, in the South especially, monthly electricity sales increase almost two thousand kilowatts-hours on average. 

This is a large increment. It would net out, for example, energy efficiency improvements of twenty existing houses of a hundred kilowatts-hours monthly.