What is cheaper for cooking: Gas of electricity?

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

13 March 2022

What is cheaper: cooking by gas or by electricity? This question comes up when the price of one of these two increases suddenly. The first time I tackled it was in 2006 after a surge in the cost of electricity. Then in 2017 when the price of gas shot up.

Gas price has increased mainly due to the introduction of 16 per cent value added tax (VAT) and, once more, several people have asked me to rework the numbers. In January I bought gas at Sh2,950; today, the price is Sh3,300. This is a 12 per cent increment, therefore, in real terms, the cost of gas has actually gone down!

Now, I don’t wish to repeat the detailed calculations from the past, so, here are the conclusions from the 2017 article. The price of electricity was Sh19.36 per kWh and after considering the energy losses of the cooker, the effective cost came to Sh29 per unit of cooking energy. For gas, the price was Sh2,300 for a 13-kg cylinder and the effective cost came to Sh36 per unit of cooking energy. Gas was more expensive in 2017.

My current electricity bill shows that I consumed 265kWh in February 2022, for which I was charged a total of Sh5,794. That is, the unit cost is Sh21.86. This is a 13 per cent increment since 2017, so, the effect cost increases by the same margin to Sh33 per unit of cooking energy.

The price of gas has gone up by 43 per cent from Sh2,300 to Sh3,300; thus, the cost of cooking has followed suit from Sh36 to Sh52 per unit of cooking energy. It turns out that gas is now much more expensive than electricity – 58 per cent more costly!

Still, there is the issue of unreliability of electricity supply: when it goes off, you have no way of telling when it will come back. Well, I have an electric oven in my house and we use it for baking about three times every month. In the last 25 years, there has never been an incident where the power went off while was something cooking in the oven! Perhaps the unreliability is exaggerated.

So, the question now is, would it be worth replacing the gas cooker with an electric one? That’s a story for another day; meanwhile, let it be known that the power in my house has just gone off while I was writing this article!