The smallest buyer pays the most

Rank every buyer of Bhutan’s electricity by the price they pay and the ladder comes out upside down: the household — the smallest buyer in the country — pays the top rate, while the 23 industrial giants who consume about 88% of domestic electricity pay the least, on terms almost no other country offers. In between sit the export tariffs: India’s grid buys Tala’s power for less than a Thimphu kitchen pays for its own river’s electricity.

The shaded band is the reality check: it is not a tariff but a cost — what Bhutan pays to buy power back from India across the winter lean season, roughly Nu 4–6 a unit. Every rung of the ladder sits below it.

How each rung got there — the financing history behind the export prices, the industrial strategy behind HV1, the rural-grid economics behind the household rate, and the 2026 revision that proposed to keep the shape while doubling the household number — is the subject of Who Gets the Cheap Power?. The wider system it sits in is The Water Economy.