"We are the highest in the region for household using lots of electricity," Tilak Siyambalapitya, a power sector analysts said.
"For medium and large commercial customers we are the highest. For manufacturing industry, we are certainly not the highest, Singapore is the highest."
He was speaking to members of the Sri Lanka Association of Economists at its annual sessions.
For households which used more than 300 units (kiloWatt hours) Sri Lanka's tariff was about 23.87 rupees, compared to 21.09 rupees for Singapore, an analysis by Siyambalapitiya showed.
Commercial customers (which are in the service sector) were charged highest rates.
Medium size commercial customers were charged 22.09 rupees a unit, higher than Singapore at 21.09 rupees, while large commercial users had to pay an average of 20.98 rupees. In Singapore it was only 14.60 rupees for large customers.
Small industries in Sri Lanka was charged only 10.55 rupees, lower than Singapore (21.09 rupees), Philippines (16.33 rupees), Pakistan (11.60), Malaysia (12.76), Tamil Nadu (12.04) and Maharashtra (11.95).
But Bangladesh, Kerala, and South Korea were lower. For very large industrial customers, Singapore, Philippines, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra were higher.
Sri Lanka's had high production costs for years because rulers had opposed plans by engineers at state-run Ceylon Electricity Board to build cheap coal power plants. They also controlled retail prices and made utilities run at a losses.
The losses were subsidized with taxes extracted from citizens through other means, by adding to national debt, or printing money and creating inflation and currency depreciation in a complex deception that is not easily understood by the ordinary people.
Even now the CEB's loans are under a Treasury moratorium.
However a 300 MegaWatt coal plant has now been built which can generate energy at around 10.00 rupees a unit. More plants are in the pipeline.
Sri Lanka's cost of production now was about 14.00 rupees. But commercial and household customers were paying far above cost, while manufacturing industry was getting subsidies.
Siyambalapitiya's earlier analysis were used by industrialists to demand subsidies but prices in other countries have since caught up.
Commercial customers, or householders are not organized enough to resist the discrimination practiced upon them through cross subsidies by the state.
