Some practical fuel cost examples:

Natural gas
is sold by its heating value in 'Giga Joules', not by its volume because the heating ability per unit volume can vary. Since it is a commodity, its price can vary.
Electricity
is sold by the 'kilowatt hour'. In BC, the cost for 1 kwh is currently $0.0615. That is 6.15 cents for 1,000 watts for one hour - or 100 watts for ten hours. So to run a typical 1500 watt electric heater for one hour it costs (1.5kW X 6.15 cents, or about 10 cents an hour)

Some definitions you have to understand for this to make sense:

' / ' means per or divided by. * or X mean to multiply.
1 Joule = 1 watt for 1 second ( a tiny amount of energy )
1 Giga Joule = 1 billion Joules ( a fixed amount of energy used for billing purposes)

1 Giga Joule is the same amount of energy as 277 kilowatt hours. That is about the amount of electricity used in 15 days in an average home.

The cost of 277 kW hours of electricity (1 GJ worth) in November = 277 X 6.15 cents/kwh = $ 17.03
The cost of 1 GJ of natural gas (277 kW worth) in November 2007 is hovers about $ 7.00 per GJ

So you can see that heating with natural gas is less than half the cost as heating with electricity.

Facts about Oil:
The cost of 1 liter of heating oil at the end of Nov 2007 is $ 0.92. It was $0.77 at end of Sept 2007, the price difference a result of a barrel of oil costing nearly $ 100. Oil, like natural gas, is traded as a commodity on the stock markets.

A typical home oil tank holds 300 US gallons, or 1130 liters.

The heating value of 1 liter of # 2 heating oil is 37,000 BTU, or British Thermal Units. (An old, but useful measuring system - based on 140,000 BTU per USA gallon)

At 37,000 BTU per liter / 3,413 BTU per kW hour = 10.8 kW hour per liter of heating oil. This means that there is the same amount of energy in one liter of oil as that used by a 1000 watt electric heater running for 10.8 hours.

10.8 kW of electricity at $ 0.0615 per kW = (10.8 X 6.15) = 66.4 cents

And as said above, 1 liter of heating oil costs 92 cents. Add to that the lower efficiency of some gas or oil furnaces and the real cost is somewhat more. If the furnace is 75 % efficient, then 25 % of the cost is going to waste. Electric heat on the other hand, although also quite expensive, is nearly 100 % efficient, so all the power used is turned to heat at the electric heater.

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