Electricity prices

Electricity Price Differences by Country

The lowest residential electricity prices are in Ethiopia, Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan and a few other countries where one kWh of electricity costs less than USD 0.10. Some of these counties, such as Iran and Libya, subsidize their electricity prices as they are rich in energy resources. Others, such as Ethiopia, are pressed to subsidize prices as incomes in the country are very low and electricity is an essential product.

The most expensive countries are a mix of two kinds. One is remote islands like Bermuda and the Bahamas that rely on fossil fuels for electricity generation with no option to import electricity from a neighbor. The other kind are advanced countries in Europe with relatively high taxes and transmission and distribution costs.


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Data Parameters

The prices are per kWh and include all items in the electricity bill such as the distribution and energy cost, various environmental and fuel cost charges and taxes. The residential prices are calculated using the average annual household electricity consumption per year and for businesses, we use 1,000,000 kWh consumption per year. We do, however, calculate several data points at different levels of consumption for both households and businesses.

Data Collection Methodology

Broadly, the collection of electricity prices depends on whether or not the country has liberalized or regulated power markets. In regulated markets, the government periodically announces new tariff structures. We use these documents to distill the information into the numbers that you see in the data set. The challenge is to have country-specific methodologies that ensure consistency across countries and over time using documents in local languages and changing formats.

In liberalized markets, we take power prices from the current offers of the largest electricity providers, the cost of distribution and transmission from the regulators, and the various applicable taxes and fees from additional research. We give more weight to providers with a larger market share. We also do research to see if the government has adopted any price support mechanisms as the ones that became widespread after the energy price shock in 2022. Here the challenge is to pull information from a variety of sources and to not miss anything.

Hence, for each country - liberalized or regulated - we have a separate methodology with sources and instructions on how to summarize the information. The sources and methodologies evolve over time. The methodology is described in more detail on the about page. It is also useful to read about the differences between our data and official statistics.

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World map: electricity prices

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