Why is electricity so bloody expensive in the UK?

[Coshofliving]

You can economise as much as you wish wrt gas heating costs but we're dark a lot of the year so we need lighting plus firing up our gas at all means we use electricity. And it costs bloody loads of money compared to other similar northern latitude countries. Why is that?

But according to this, Germany and Denmark are not more expensive. From what I've seen they spend more money on electricity as they rarely have gas, but the unit price is cheaper. Electricity prices by country 2023 | Statista

Electricity may be more in Sweden, but wages are also higher.

Our current issues are privatised providers, lack of investment in renewables (both the fault of the Tories) plus high energy costs globally.

That graph is misleading because it doesn't take into account the fact that the UK government subsidised electricity down to 35 p a unit and the price has now fallen so most people will be paying around 27 p per unit. Of course, we don't know what arrangements other countries had to subsidise electricity costs or generally how they compared with incomes.

Is it? Because it says that's what 'households were charged' and it's in USD/kilowatt hours. At that time without the government subsidies it was more than the amount shown in GBP. The price shown is roughly 37p/kwh at current exchange rates so it seems accurate.

You are right though, the price has dropped since March but has it in other countries too?

https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Austria/electricity_prices/
Austria - 0.47cents per unit. Higher than uk which is says is 0.46 cents.
Austria - daily standing charge average €2, UK 0.52p