Energy · Lighting Since 1300

UK Cost of Light

The fuel cost of a fixed quantity of light fell 13,800-fold from 1300; the last half-century is almost flat.

• £29,674 → £2.15/Mlmh, 1300–2023
• Halving every 280 years, then every 19
• Flat since 1970, rising since 2017
• Marginal fuel cost, UK, five-year mean

The energy cost of light itself: the fuel or electricity needed to produce one million lumen-hours in the United Kingdom, about 600 hours of a 100-watt incandescent bulb, from 1300 to 2023 in constant 2000 pounds. It falls from £29,674 to £2.15, roughly 13,800-fold, across three technologies stitched into one line. Through the candle centuries it barely moved: 3.5-fold across the five hundred years to 1800, a halving every 280 years, with candles still 90% of the lighting fuel then and whale oil the other 10%. Gas steepened the line, reaching 78% of the fuel mix by 1850 and 82% by 1900, with kerosene at 15%. Between 1800 and 1900 the cost fell 38-fold, a halving every 19 years, and electrification carried it 45-fold further between 1920 and 1970.

Britain has been lit almost entirely by electricity since 1950, and since 1970 the line is nearly flat: 39% lower after fifty-three years, and higher in both 1980 and 1990 than it was in 1970. The series low is £1.80 in 2017, and 2023 stands at £2.15, 19% above the floor after six years of rebound. This measure is a fuel price divided by an appliance efficiency, so on an all-electric grid a rising line means the real price of electricity climbing faster than lamps improve.

Fouquet and Pearson estimate only the marginal fuel cost, explicitly excluding the lamp itself, capital, labour, health and environmental costs, so this is not what lighting costs a household. The 724 annual values are reconstructed rather than observed: the early centuries rest on one or a few institutions in the south of England, gas use before 1881 and kerosene lighting before 1910 are extrapolated, and appliance efficiencies come from a simple diffusion model. Its resolution is decades and technology transitions, not single years. Every value is a five-year trailing mean, so the 2023 point averages 2019 to 2023. The series covers the United Kingdom alone, published by Our World in Data, who name Fouquet (2026) and Fouquet and Pearson (2006) as the upstream and publish their processing code. The fuel shares quoted above come from Fouquet and Pearson’s own 2006 table, while the prices are Fouquet’s 2026 revision of the same series. Only every tenth year is drawn, plus the 2017 low and the 2023 endpoint; the thinning chooses which published rows appear and alters none of them.

Source: Fouquet (2026); Fouquet & Pearson (2006), via Our World in Data

Download the data: lighting_cost_lumen_hour.csv · lighting_cost_lumen_hour.json

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.