Labor hours per MWh of residential electricity

Labor hours per MWh of residential electricity, version 1.0

Classification. Derived: deterministic arithmetic over stored values; every number is reproducible from the stored ids named in the observation's metadata.

Formula. For each month, the residential electricity price in cents per kilowatt-hour is multiplied by 10 (1000 kWh per MWh divided by 100 cents per dollar) to give dollars per megawatt-hour, then divided by average hourly earnings in dollars per hour. The result is hours.

Engine rendering: Electricity_price_usd_per_mwh for USA multiplied by 10 divided by hourly_earnings for USA, for each geography and period. A period with any component missing produces no value. Rounded to 3 decimals.

Components.

• electricity_price_usd_per_mwh, metric us-electricity-retail-price-residential (USA), x 10. Average price of residential electricity, US, including taxes (EIA ESRCUUS), converted to dollars per MWh.
• hourly_earnings, metric us-average-hourly-earnings (USA). Average hourly earnings of all employees, total private (BLS CES0500000003 via FRED).

Windows and alignment. Monthly, United States. The electricity price and earnings are monthly series matched on the month. The gasoline price is weekly (reported for Mondays); the weeks whose date falls in a calendar month are averaged into that month before dividing, and the ids of the averaged weeks are recorded on the row.

Missing data. A period is produced only when every component has a value for it; nothing is interpolated, carried forward or estimated.

Rationale. Abundance in Labor Hours (upgrade vision, docs/upgrade/20) asks how many hours of representative labor obtain a common necessity. Electricity is priced per unit of energy and earned per hour of work, so the ratio is a physical quantity in a physical unit, with no index and no deflator.

Limitations. Average hourly earnings are a mean across all private employees, not a median and not after tax, so the hours are those of an average earner, and a distribution shift changes them without any change in prices. Prices are national averages; households in different states face different electricity and gasoline prices. Both components are nominal, which is the point: no deflator is involved, the measure is a physical quantity against a wage.

Revision. Recomputed at every derived pass; a changed component value produces a new observation row and earlier rows are kept. A change to anything that affects the numbers is a new formula version (the spec hash is on every row and a changed spec under a used version is refused).