The price of electricity has always been important in the life of people in general, but for cryptocurrency miners, it has become the question of life and death, due to the profound impact on the economics of mining Bitcoin and other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. Therefore, it is important to look at the current situation of energy costs around the world.
The data in this article was gathered by the Elite Mining Inc R&D team, but there are some limitations to it. Certain statistics only offer country averages instead of exact numbers. Additionally, publication time for the data about some countries is not Q4 2018, while the most recent datasets are from that time period.
European data:
Electricity prices for non-household consumers
Electricity prices for household consumers
World data:
Electricity Prices
The picture below offers a comparison of most of the countries in the world and their respective electricity prices, noted in shades of green.
This research suggests that the lowest electricity price is $0.02 kWh for Burma and Egypt, the highest price is $0.34 kWh for Denmark. Below is the list of 20 countries with the lowest electricity prices, which is the range between $0.02 and $0.06 kWh.
In this compilation of 20 countries with the lowest electricity prices, 14 are listed as “developing”. Due to political and economic instability in several of those countries, one could argue that it’s not safe to have cryptocurrency mining operations there. For example, most of the African states still have poverty issues, blackouts, and don’t have fully functional electrical grids. It is estimated that more than 600 Million people don’t have access to electricity in Africa.
African data:
usaid.gov: Where we work
usitc.gov: Low electricity supply in SSA
Worldbank
In Latin America 23.2 million of 466.1 million people do not have power at all. Latin America countries with the highest percentage of electricity issues are Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua.
Africa / Asia / Middle East / Latin America:
Washingtonpost: World without power
Overall, Western countries have the highest energy costs. For crypto mining, this does not seem optimal. However, Western countries have stable economies, institutions, laws to protect commercial operations, and the infrastructure to support electrical and monetary requirements. The areas of the world that do not enjoy these advantages may prove to be suboptimal choices for large-scale mining operations, regardless of nominal energy costs.
Elite Mining Inc currently has an average electricity price of $0.052 kWh, which falls within the top 15 cheapest electricity countries included in this research. The USA would be the only Western country in this list if the rate secured by Elite Mining Inc was the average for the whole country.
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Written and researched by Erald Cipi from the EMI R&D department.