For me the annoying thing is that everyone seems to assume using SvelteKit by default when looking something up about svelte. No, i don't want to use this folder based routing or server side rendering, i want to ise it to write a frontend for a backend.
It doesn't need to be that amount, just a significant amount, to be worth mentioning. Though even if that much were true, you would have unusually high electricity bills at home¹.
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[1] much like we do in the UK, but that is because our national grid is a privatised mess effectively run by external concerns (EDF have their fingers in the pie, for one example) charging us much more than they can get away with in their home markets.
> Albania, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Estonia, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Venezuela
Even if Estonia does have stated electricity distribution loss, it still looks so way out of place in this group of countries by so many criteria. I wonder why not pick Egypt or Libya given that they have the same distribution loss.
Edit: this could be the reason - when you click on "Map" above the graph, for some reason Estonia is one of the blue countries shown on the map. Argentina, Brazil, and Kenya are there too (but not others).
Interestingly, this page seems to contain data only until year 2014, but the graph next to Estonia in the grandparent link does show an increase on the right side. Maybe Estonia did indeed experience some changes in overall distribution loss in recent years?
Elering reports only their part, the very high voltage transmission losses. Then there are the distribution losses on the local level are they're about 4%.
The article also says Brazil's "problems look like Delhi’s 25 years ago", which is very incorrect from what they're describing. Almost none of what is described in the article happened in Brazil 20 years ago, let alone today. Energy theft, for instance, happens here but at a minuscule scale compared to what's on the article.
I also doubt Estonia has any of these issues whatsoever, like energy theft.
It really seems like a vibecoded article with numbers informing incorrect conclusions. Perhaps with a dash of nationalistic pride. Unfortunate from IEEE.
I did query ChatGPT and it seemingly wrong headedly suggested that Estonia had closed lots of Oil Shale power which it did have, I am not too up on this.
I did push back hard saying that that's not the same as what the article talked about at all.
The thing is if the World Bank is making statistics people are basing decisions on this is an issue.
There are basically none, because the fees are low and card issuers are not allowed to rob retailers with insane fees. If you have a cafe or restaurant where margins are already low then it would be crazy to pay additional 2-3% tax on every payment.
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