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The world lacks a safe, low-carbon, and cheap large-scale energy infrastructure.
Until we scale up such an energy infrastructure, the world will continue to face two energy problems: hundreds of millions of people lack access to sufficient energy, and the dominance of fossil fuels in our energy system drives climate change and other health impacts such as air pollution.
To ensure everyone has access to clean and safe energy, we need to understand energy consumption and its impacts around the world today and how this has changed over time.
On this page, you can find all our data, visualizations, and writing relating to energy.
There are several ways to measure energy consumption. In one of our articles, we explain some of these in more detail.
One of those measures is primary energy. That is, the amount of energy that goes into our energy system before it’s been transformed into anything else. It’s the energy content of the coal and gas we burn in power plants, or the energy content of the oil before we burn it in cars, ships or planes.
That means it doesn’t capture the amount of energy that humans actually consume at the end of the chain, because a lot of that energy is wasted along the way.
This is the metric that many international organizations that publish energy data use, which is why we present it here. We would also like to present data on final or useful energy consumption, but there are no international, open databases that would allow us to do so.
In this chart, you can explore data on primary energy use: how much is consumed in total, how much is consumed per person, and which sources it comes from.
From this data, we see:
Global primary energy use has grown dramatically over centuries, due to a combination of population and economic growth. This century, it has increased by more than 50%.
There are huge differences in energy use per person across the world. North Americans consume more than twice the global average, and more than ten times as much as the average across Africa.
Most of the world’s primary energy still comes from fossil fuels, although this share is declining. This specific data overstates the role of fossil fuels in final energy consumption, though, because a large amount of fossil fuel energy is wasted during combustion.
There are a small number of countries where fossil fuels, collectively, are not the largest source of primary energy, such as France, Sweden, and Norway. But in most, this is still the case.
Keep in mind that primary energy use is the total energy consumption from all sectors: transport, industry, commercial, and residential.
Electricity, which many people first think of, is just one subset of total energy use. That’s what we’ll look at next.
Electricity generation and sources
Electricity is just one component of primary energy use, which we looked at above. Globally, it’s around one-fifth of it.
Let’s zoom in on this part, then, to see how power generation compares across the world.
In the chart, you can explore total electricity generation in each country, how this compares per person, and what sources it’s generated from.
This data focuses on generation, not consumption. For most countries, the difference between the two is not huge. But for those that either rely heavily on imports or export a lot of electricity, this difference can be substantial.
From this data, we see that:
Global electricity generation is growing quickly; it has more than doubled this century. Almost all of this growth has come from Asia.
There are still large differences in electricity generation per person across the world: North America consumes almost twice the global average, and Europe also consumes far more per person than in other regions.
Over half of the world’s electricity still comes from fossil fuels, although this share is falling.
There are huge differences in the share of electricity that comes from low-carbon sources. In some countries, nuclear and renewables produce almost all of the country’s power. In others, the contribution of these sources is minimal.
Explore the key metrics on energy for a country of your choice. How much energy is used overall? Which sources is it produced from? Is progress being made on decarbonizing the energy mix?
Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as:
Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2023) - “Energy” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/energy' [Online Resource]
BibTeX citation
@article{owid-energy,
author = {Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado and Max Roser},
title = {Energy},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2023},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/energy}
}
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