Obviously everything I described is a simplified model where energy costs change equally for all miners. The real world is not that simple, but there is some correlation in energy costs across different regions as there is a global market for typical fuels (coal, natural gas, uranium, etc.).
It is also important to remember that transaction fees are not in proportion to transaction sizes. People doing large Bitcoin transactions could absorb much higher fees, so in all likelihood nobody would be priced out of the market (and Bitcoin would be dominated by large transactions, which is more or less the case right now).