Civil electricity ladder price reform, will soon be put into practice

The full name of “ladder price” is “stepwise progressive price”, which means that the average electricity consumption per household is divided into several steps. The first ladder is the base of the number of electric power facilities. This ladder has less electricity and the electricity price per kilowatt hour is also lower. The second tier has a higher electricity level and higher electricity prices. The third tier has more electricity and the electricity price is higher. With the increase of electricity consumption per household, the electricity price per kilowatt-hour is increasing step by step, and the price per kilowatt-hour is not lower than 0.20 yuan.

Zhou Dadi, former director of the Energy Research Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission and vice chairman of the China Energy Research Association, said that the reason why the ladder price was not launched in time last year was mainly due to the high inflation factor at that time. At present, under the background of declining inflationary pressure, the call for full price adjustments has once again begun to ring.

The ladder price is mainly reflected in:
On the basis of protecting the residents' normal lives and using electricity, we must use more, and we must pay more. This is the main purpose of ladder electricity prices. Raise people's awareness of power conservation to protect the environment. Electricity prices should be priced according to the gap between rich and poor. Places that are poorer should be priced according to local conditions, and those that are rich should raise their prices. In this way, there is not so much pressure in the poor areas. Reduce the gap between the rich and the poor and the pressure of electricity use.
Control power shortages and avoid large-scale power cuts. As coal prices continue to rise, thermal power companies have begun to lose money and their enthusiasm for generating electricity has declined. Especially this year, power shortages have appeared in the off-season. All parties seem to have treated electricity prices as a recipe for resolving the power shortage problem. However, the increase in electricity prices is still not a good solution to the problem. The more serious problem lies in the fact that the increase in the price of electricity as a public good has a large impact and will push up prices in all industries. Step-by-step electricity prices are conducive to encouraging residents to save electricity, ease the short-term resources, the contradiction between coal and electricity, and achieve energy conservation goals.

However, some people are sceptical about the ladder price reform:
The implementation of ladder electricity prices is mainly aimed at saving energy. However, one thing cannot be ignored. It is the poor who implement the ladder of ladder electricity prices because the middle and lower income earners have to survive and the goods must not be saved. Then, we must go to the province of food and clothing. And what about high-income earners? It does not matter to them. What kind of impact will the lower-middle-income earners have on food and clothing?
The use of economic leverage to urge residents to conserve electricity is the original intention of implementing the ladder price, but it cannot fundamentally ease the current power conflict. After all, the proportion of households living in urban and rural areas accounts for a small proportion of the country’s total electricity consumption, which is currently only about 14%.

Because the residential electricity voltage level is lower than that of industrial and other industries, the high voltage electricity delivered by the grid requires multi-step voltage reduction. Therefore, the cost of power transmission and transformation is actually higher than that of industrial users. In the past, other companies, such as enterprises, formed subsidies for electricity use by residents. In foreign countries, the residential electricity price is generally 1.5 to 2 times the industrial electricity price. Therefore, such an unreasonable pricing structure is in urgent need of change. The relevant state departments have already determined that they will implement the ladder price reform in the civilian sector.