Working Paper 15
The Real Cost of Power: Commercial and Industrial Energy Burden Across the World
October 2026
Abstract
Industrial electricity prices across 54 major economies span a 15-fold range, from $0.02/kWh in Qatar to $0.29/kWh in Ireland. This paper assembles all-in delivered prices (energy, demand charges, taxes, carbon), reliability-adjusted effective costs, subsidy positions, and sector energy intensities, and builds a composite burden index to test a central hypothesis: low-nominal-price economies can face greater effective burden, while high-price economies can partially offset cost through productivity and efficiency. The hypothesis survives with sharp limits. Rankings by nominal price carry almost no information about real burden: the rank correlation between nominal industrial price and income-adjusted burden is 0.30, and against the composite burden index it is 0.01. Nigeria's $0.049/kWh commercial tariff coexists with an effective burden 5 to 10 times higher once self-generation is counted; Ireland's $0.29/kWh industrial price, the sample's highest, maps to the second-lightest burden once low energy intensity and near-zero outages are counted. Aluminium smelting inverts the ranking completely (Qatar $280/t vs Germany $3,745/t of energy cost per tonne), while semiconductors show the opposite pattern: enormous physical intensity, negligible cost burden. Ten documented cases show where national tariffs mislead (bilateral contracting, captive power, coal-route chemicals), where volatility rather than price level binds investment (PJM capacity, Korea's frozen fuel adjustment), and where the forward scenarios are most fragile.