While the average cost of a kilowatt hour of electricity in Europe for the second half of 2008 and the first half of 2009 tallied €0.165, Germans paid €0.229, the European Union statistics office Eurostat reported from its headquarters in Luxembourg.

When adjusted for purchasing power, Germans paid the third-highest prices to power their country, the study added.

The Danes paid the most at €0.255 per kilowatt hour, while Bulgarians paid less than half the price at €0.08 per kilowatt hour, Eurostat reported.

Against the overall European trend, which saw electricity prices go down by 1.5 percent during that time period, German consumers bore a 4.5 percent increase.

The biggest reduction in electricity prices were in Cypress (20 percent) and Italy (10 percent), while the steepest increases were in Poland (18 percent) and Luxembourg (17 percent).

Meanwhile German electricity taxes of 41 percent were also found to be the second highest in the EU, Eurostat reported. Denmark’s electricity tax of 56 percent was the highest, while the European average was much lower at just 26 percent.

Germans did get a break on gas prices, though, which dropped by 22.8 percent, a bit more than the Europe-wide average decrease of 16 percent.