We mostly don't have AC, we have tiny houses, our heating is gas powered. Lots of showers aren't electric either. We don't use huge amounts compared to the US

Gladly would, but few can afford :-/

When you switch to heat pumps you'll get AC for no extra capital cost.

Unfortunately not. Most houses in the UK are heated using a 'central heating' loop. A closed loop of water that circulated through pipes run through the house and through large radiators in each room. A central boiler, usually a gas boiler, burns gas to heat and circulate this loop to provide whole-house heating, while also typically using a heat exchanger to heat the intake cold drinking water supply into a whole house hot drinking water. (Thus, most houses have cold, hot, and central heating piping).

If you switch out the gas boiler for a heat pump, it can still heat the hot water and heat the central heating loop. But it can't provide cooling that way. There is no infrastructure in most houses to run AC ducting or refrigerant pipes.

You might think that you could simply cool the water in the central heating loop, and therefore make all of the radiators very cold, and use that to move heat out of rooms. In theory that might work, but in most houses these central heating pipes are not insulated and run under floorboards. If you make them cold then they'll cause condensation, leading to water in all kinds of small spaces, and likely leading to warping, damage, or mould.

In the UK, retrofitting AC into an existing house is a huge undertaking in most cases.

Good point. Not to mention the circulation will be all wrong had the radiator been cool instead of warm. (The primary means of heating by radiator actually comes from convection rather than radiation.)

Good point, my mistake.

That's the annual figure. But just for electricity. Most UK homes are heated with gas, and many have gas stoves, so the average kWh annual gas figure is much higher (~12,000kWh).

3100 kWh is the figure set by the regulator as the representative annual usage used to calculate prices for e.g. tariff comparison between suppliers. It makes sense to use it here.

We're at ~3.6 MWh in a ground floor apartment with 2 adults, with water heating (e.g. showering) electric but building heating on gas (though we use a space heater a lot as well, probably to the tune of 0.2 MWh/year)

I wonder if I should feel bad since I'm currently at 2830 kWh in 2024 for a single household with all heating costs not coming out of my electric bill.

I‘m at ~1200 kWh for what sounds like the same.

Hard to say since usage doesn't simply divide by 2: the fridge needs to run regardless of how much food there is (it matters, but not linearly), or if you watch a TV every evening with 2 persons or 1 doesn't show up on the bill either. Probably best to ask friends and see how they get their costs down or if, conversely, you can give them tips

Californian pricing would be okay if we had Californian living standards.

Median income and take home pay should be brought into account though. California has one of the highest even by US standards so a $1000 bill for the median Californian family feels much less expensive than for the median Manchester family.

There are no median families. There are a lot of very high wage earners in CA. You should really be looking for the mode here.

I agree, the mode is probably better. Anyway from the median you can also get a good guess of how much income the band sitting between 25%-75% has since it's a normal distribution. Either comparison should be ok for a guesstimate of the impact of electricity bills for a family in California vs different parts of the UK.

There is clearly a difference between states that invested in projects that went over budget. Power generation is cheaper in a lot of states due to the price of natural gas is dramatically lower than it was 20 years ago. Florida uses gas for 75% of electricity.