Lighting Fuel Prices
Think the price of gas is bad, try kerosene for lanterns.
(Chart from Lumina Project report: "Solid-State Lighting on a Shoestring Budget: The Economics of Off-Grid Lighting for Small Businesses in Kenya")
The world has been on the fossil fuel roller-coaster for decades, and the most recent spike was one of the worst. According to the Chart, what goes up does not always go down -- at least for one location in Kenya that Lumina Project researchers at Humboldt State University have been following particularly closely. Wealthy energy users in the industrial world saw a greater drop in oil prices following the spike than did those at the bottom of the economic period. One of the many inequities in this domain.
In practice, kerosene prices vary widely. Many factors are at work. Where it is heavily subsidized, prices can be quite low, e.g. around $0.25/liter in India today, despite many recent price increases. It is said that the Indian government spends more subsidizing kerosene prices than it does on education....
On the other hand, where energy taxes are employed, kerosene prices can rise well over $1/liter in the cities. But this is for people able to buy relatively large volumes (a liter or more at a time). The poorest off-grid lighting users often can only afford a few tablespoons of fuel at a time, and are hit with substantial markups for that. Users report paying more than twice the price at the pump for these small quantities. I've seen prices reported ranging from $0.07 to $2.00 per liter (Table S5 in the Supporting Online Material for an article we wrote in Science).
Similarly, as one gets farther from urban centers, prices tend to go up. This is due in part to scarcity, but also to the greater difficulty of gaining access.I took the following photo in rural China, where people had to carry kerosene up very steep hill trails.
Data on kerosene prices are very spotty. Sadly, there is no central repository of this information focused on what is paid by households in the developing world. Having this information is important for humanitarian purposes, and to perform accurate cost-benefit analyses on alternative strategies. Those paying the most for lighting fuels will of course enjoy the fastest payback times for substitutes such as LED-based systems.
