The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s

wood_spirit

Seems generally like a good thing? I know the biggest difference I can think of in my lifetime is just how much better insulated houses are. Not on a par with Scandinavia, but still massively improved from even the peak electricity consumption period in the charts of 2005. I wonder how much that contributes to the overall reduction in demand.

barelysapient

I wonder if they're paying less than the 70s?

Havoc

It’s just plain expensive thanks to the shitty price everything by most expensive source method. Of course people minimise use Currently paying 0.33 usd a unit.

advisedwang

The decline in energy from 2003-present lines up nicely with the phase out of incandescent lights in favour of CFLs and of CFLs in favour of LEDs. Lets say a house typically had 5 60W bulbs on for 8hrs a day, now replaced with an 8W bulb. That would be a 2 kWH reduction, which roughly corresponds to the drop shown in the data. EDIT: actually now that I think about it, 2kWh per-household is probably less than 1kWh per-capita. It's still a good chunk though!

klelatti

The linked iea data shows that the reduction is roughly 50/50 industrial and residential. So the deindustrialisation narrative is part of the story but improved efficiency at home is also a significant factor.

mhh__

We may genuinely have the worst energy market in the developed world. It's going to get cheaper and reliable any day soon - George monbiot told me so it must be true.

saberience

Isn't this a good thing? I mean, is there a direct correlation between electricity usage and country = better?

a_paddy

The incandescent to LED switch is a major factor, but most things have become more efficient, a Sky box uses 30x less power than the 90s.

cm2187

I was at a conference last year where one of the speakers was from National Grid. Not only these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease (even before AI, it was obvious that demand would go up as we are moving away from fossil fuel with both heating and transportation going electric). But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress. I saw the same messaging in France where the current president started his mandate with a grand programme to switch off a third of nuclear power plants. If anyone thinks adults are in charge, let alone engineers, you are greatly mistaken.

philipallstar

If you import 12 million people in 20 years, your energy generation, water provision, and housing affordability are all going to fall off a cliff vs demand.

dyauspitr

I mean, what do you expect out of a resource poor island? The only reason the UK was on the map is because it has intelligent, well spoken people that could make deals and exploit the resources of their colonies. That’s not enough when you don’t have colonies. It’s reverting to the mean.

time4tea

This is great, maybe! There are lots of factors that feed into this: lots of solar, batteries, more efficiency, improved insulation. Some others: increase of heat pumps, energy poverty, reduction in industrial energy (both due to good and bad reasons) Ultimately though, its not about how much energy per capita, its about the sources of energy, and how effectively they are used... my heat pump uses infinity more electricity than my boiler, but far more effectively uses the underlying energy source.

orf

Interesting - I had never associated the rate of energy consumption with jingoism, but based on some of the comments here it clearly is. I guess it’s sort of a “I drive a large inefficient car and that’s a good thing” kind of situation? Excessive unnecessary production and consumption is a positive trait?

andyjohnson0

There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage being posted here. But the article makes it clear that the reduction is due to reduction in demand, due in part to welcome improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and (neutral?) increased importing of electricity. Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies. I also wonder what the contribution of domestic solar and on-site industrial generation is? I'm a dev in a large manufacturing business and two of our three factory buildings are now covered in solar cells which power a lot of our operations. Some big industrial sites have on-site wind-powered generation too. Is that counted as generation in these stats? Or is it just manifested as reduced demand? (Edit: added "being posted", "welcome" and "(neutral?)" for clarity)

gste

Let's get this straight: yes, there's been a reduction in demand and increases in efficiency, but electricity is objectively extremely expensive in the UK now. Energy is being heavily imported. This has disastrous consequences for businesses and the economy. It is the number one biggest problem facing the UK economy after the huge government debt and crippling taxes... although there are a number of other problems I could mention.

niltecedu

Not unsurprising, excluding grid efficiency and industrial demand, its also just households. More and more places are getting batteries wherever possible, plug in solar is also avaialble. The amount of demand I don't forsee increasing at all unless people start getting air source heatpumps.

dofm

I can think of any number of reasons for this. The rise of gas central heating means that less electricity is used for supplemental heating. We've gone from 70% of houses using coal to heat in the 1970s, which meant a lot more electric supplemental heating, to 70% using "town gas" central heating, which means less. Combined with that, those lethal electric bar fires are a thing of the past, and the ones that remain have been replaced by efficient oil-filled radiators and at least somewhat more efficient storage heaters. Also many fewer houses rely on electric immersion heaters for water. Houses are better insulated. And it is a lot warmer (actually shockingly so — 1.5C more on the mean maximum daily temperature in winter) so there is much less supplemental electric heating needed. Cooker hobs are not the horribly inefficient hot metal ring element things they used to be — halogen, induction and gas hobs have replaced them, more use of microwaves etc. LED lighting. Solar (assuming it is not included in the numbers). Even things like electric kettle elements are modestly more efficient (more sealed-element kettles), an energy efficiency drive in the 90s persuaded people to only boil the water they needed. And talking of kettles, we drink only a third as much tea per person as we did in the 1970s, and while we drink much more coffee, it has not closed the gap. That is a _massive_ amount of electricity consumption; the average person in the 1970s drank around 25 cups of tea per week, now the average is as low as eight (which is frankly weird)

Beijinger

Yes, and this is why the living standard is falling. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.1855

yanhangyhy

but doesn't the transtion to EV will increase the demand also, in the future?

drnick1

Energy policy in Europe/UK is completely moronic. At some point in the past places like France and Germany had the most modern and technology advanced grids (nuclear) and were energy independent. Then the leftists/green came and destroyed it all, only to buy gas from Russia and the Middle East because renewables aren't enough during the winter and when demand is high. So now Germans pay the highest electricity prices in the world and still don't have AC (it's everywhere in China now). The left literally turned Germany into a third world country.