Last Friday, the Labor Department released June's consumer price index data. We put the data to work immediately. Check out the ten-page pullout, Quant Services, in the mid-July issue of PUF 2.0 published this week.
Our CPI Electric metric for June is 89.4 percent. This means the CPI for electricity increased less than nine-tenths as much as the CPI for all goods and services, since the 1982 - 1984 base period.
CPI Electric is slightly higher than it was last June. But significantly lower than it was two Junes ago.
The lower the better. Low percentages signify that the CPI for electricity increased significantly less than the CPI for all goods and services. In other words, that electric rates have fallen in real terms.
Our CPI Electric metric for Q2, the quarter ending in June, is 86.6 percent. That's higher than the record low in Q2 2000, when the metric was just 74.4 percent. But lower than the record high in Q2 and Q3 1955, when the metric was as high as 106.4 percent.
For June, our CPI Electric metric was only 79.0 percent for the northeast and 82.5 percent for the south. Though the metric was 95.6 percent for the midwest and 112.7 percent for the west.
Insightful number-crunching courtesy of the magazine for commentary, opinion and debate on utility regulation and policy since 1928, Public Utilities Fortnightly. "In PUF, Impact the Debate."
Steve Mitnick, Editor-in-Chief, Public Utilities Fortnightly
E-mail me: mitnick@fortnightly.com