This whole study is bullshit, electricity price in Kuwait is 6.5 cents per kWh for "undefined manufacturing" which is where bitcoin falls under, which means even while using the most advanced gear you are nowhere near the 1.4k cost mentioned in this "study".
Using the household prices it ranges from 1.6 cents to 5 cents, but long story short, once you pass 9 KWh a MONTH (which every asic miner will do in a few hours) you jump to the 5 cents tier, the 1.6 cents is for below 3 kWh a month, that isn't enough to mine a fraction of bitcoin, but ya, I understand why they had these numbers incorrect, most people who write such content are lazy, and they still get paid for writing nonsense like that.
I don't know the prices of other countries mentioned in the study, but I am sure that most will be incorrect, so it's safe to assume that this whole thing is just b.s.
Agreed and since it's just talking about electric rates it leaves off a lot of other factors, some of which Phil touched on above and others that I have discussed in the past. Climate plays a large part. It's better to pay more for electric and mine in a cooler environment to keep cooling costs down vs. cheaper rates but keeping the chillers running full blast all the time.
Reliability and cost of internet. Yes most of us here can run our miners off of a cable modem or whatever. The big players have multiple fiber connections and run their own BGP.
And so on.
-Dave