Electrical loss reduction: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Loss reduction pays through lower electricity bills and avoided penalties for poor power factor. Its cost is capacitors, filters, efficient transformers and regenerative inverters, so copper, electrical steel and semiconductor prices set the hardware cost.
No public price Electrical loss reduction has no public monthly price series: Savings sit inside equipment and tariffs; no traded price.What its price moves with
Efficient transformers, active filters and regenerative drives are all power electronics. Their prices, now raised by long transformer order books, set the cost of cutting losses. This activity has no price series, so no statistics are shown.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Capacitor banks correct poor power factor in factories, reducing currents and losses in cables and transformers. Capacitor prices are a direct cost of this most common fix. Industrial tariffs in India often penalise poor power factor, which makes these banks pay quickly.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Thicker copper windings and cables cut resistive losses, so higher-efficiency motors and transformers use more copper. Dear copper raises the cost of efficiency, sometimes pushing buyers to aluminium. Each choice trades higher purchase cost against lower lifetime losses.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Low-loss transformers use high-grade grain-oriented or amorphous electrical steel. These special grades cost more than ordinary steel, and supply limits have slowed adoption. Rules on transformer efficiency, tightened in several countries, are raising demand for these grades.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Factories with large motor and furnace loads gain most from loss reduction, and industrial tariffs set the payback. Higher tariffs and penalties for poor power factor, common in India, make projects pay sooner.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Gallium nitride transistors switch with far lower losses than silicon in chargers, inverters and data centre power supplies. China dominates gallium supply, and export controls there affect device costs; gallium has no price series here.
No public price for gallium, so the link is explained in words only.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.