Global Electricity Price Comparison

[MrWorldwide]

For those who make do with a single fan and a bucket of water in the hot season, you have my respect and my sympathy, For the rest of us, aircon is both necessary and highly desirable, I also like my toys - audio and visual - and it all costs money. If you dont consider electricity costs relevant to retirement budgets, please don't read on - to me, it's all part of the puzzle and we've all seen the hilariously conservative estimates of what it costs to live in a given country longterm. Feel free to trot out 'move to Chiang Rai' and other standbys, but I reserve the right to live in the hottest and nastiest part of Asia I can find - as long as the women are hot and the beer cold.

http://en.wikipedia....rice_comparison

As much as I hesitate to post a Wikipedia link given the level of skepticism here, I'd prefer to use the figures contained therein not as absolute values but simply as a relative means of trying to determine what it will cost to run air conditioning and refrigerators 24/7 from one country to the next. I don't have a problem with anyone disputing the figures themselves, and some are obviously dated, but please provide your own links of there is a marked difference between the figures in that chart and your own. The key metric is US cents per kW/h : equivalent figures would be greatly appreciated.

To cherry-pick a few developed economies:

Australia - 22 to 46.56 (varies from state to state and electricity provider)

United Kingdom - 17.85

United States - 8 to 17 (37 in Hawaii - sheeit ..)

New Zealand - 19.5

Belgium - 29.06

Sweden - 27.10

OK - we can talk energy sources, the cost of delivering a network over a massive country yada yada - Oz is expensive in anyone's language and, IMO, the US has to look long and hard at its aging nuclear power plants. End of sermon.

Now to some potential retirement destinations:

Thailand - 4.46 to 7.96

Malaysia - 7.42

Phillipines - 30.46 (!)

Brazil - 34.18

Mexico - 19.28

Vietnam - 6.20 to 10.01

Singapore - 22.24

(Indonesia not listed - presumably it differs wildly from one island to the next)

For those who might think 'It's irrelevant when you are earning a salary in a given country - you have more than enough for electricity', let me put it this way - for retirees, you are earning whatever investment returns you can get in a given year and that's it. How many of us want to pay more for electricity - particularly in a country which demands aircon for 4-6 months of the year - than we absolutely have to ?

Nothing in that chart speaks to the reliability of the network, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that it's likely to be more reliable in Malaysia than PI (anyone ?), yet the figure for Malaysia is one of the lowest. I would also contend that these numbers go a long way beyond the cost of cooling your house or watching Thai soaps (!) - not hard to see why Ford prefers to build cars from their greenfields site outside Rayong over another country which charges as little as an extra cent per kw/H - you dont need an Accountancy degree to see how that can really add up in a large factory. More investment, more jobs, less political instability - welcome to MrWorldwide's Simplistic View of the World

Anyone looking at the rat's nest perched atop virtually every power pole in downtown BKK would have to ask whether Thailand needs to spend several billion baht getting their infrastructure up to scratch - my time in Malaysia tells me they are well ahead of the Thais in this area.

(wild speculation re Malaysia's relative standing in that table removed when I realised just how much variance there is in the dates given for each of those figures - I havent given up on this, but I need to find more current data ..)

Edited February 18, 2013 by MrWorldwide