Methodology & sources

What we did

For each of the 5 countries we cover, we researched official regulators and statistics bodies — Ofgem (UK), the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Canada Energy Regulator (CER), and Ireland’s CRU/SEAI — for three things: typical household bills by usage level, seasonal cost patterns, and currently-available government support schemes. Every figure on this site links to where it came from.

Where an official body doesn’t publish a particular breakdown (most commonly: a clean “% higher in winter” seasonal figure, or bills by literal household size rather than usage band), we say so explicitly rather than inventing a number. Where we found a real figure but only via a secondary source rather than reading the official page ourselves, that’s flagged too.

Ofgem’s own Typical Domestic Consumption Values decision document and price cap pages were fetched directly.

AER’s determination was confirmed via its own release plus Canstar’s reporting, which explicitly cites the AER figures; some state-concession amounts came via aggregator sites and are worth re-checking against the state .gov.au page directly.

EIA’s own Today in Energy and Winter Fuels Outlook pages were fetched directly. State-level cents/kWh figures came via third-party sites citing EIA and should be re-pulled from EIA’s Electricity Data Browser before treating as exact.

The Canada Energy Regulator’s Market Snapshot was fetched directly. Most provincial utility rate pages (Ontario, BC, Quebec) were blocked this session — those specific dollar figures were dropped rather than published unverified.

gov.ie, seai.ie and cru.ie all blocked direct page fetches this session — every Irish figure here came via WebSearch summaries of those official domains, not a page we read ourselves. Treat Irish numbers as the most in-need-of-a-manual-check of the five.