Access to Energy
Access to electricity and clean cooking fuels are vital for a good standard of living and good health.
Access to electricity
What share of people have access to electricity?
Electricity is a crucial for poverty alleviation, economic growth and improved living standards (these links are discussed later in the entry).1
Measuring the share of people with electricity access is therefore an important social and economic indicator. There is no universally-adopted definition of what 'access to electricity' means. However, most definitions are aligned to the delivery of electricity, safe cooking facilities and a required minimum level of consumption. The International Energy Agency (IEA) definition entails more than just the delivery to the household. It also requires households to meet a specified minimum level of electricity, which is set based on whether the household is rural or urban, and which increases with time. For rural households, this minimum threshold is 250 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year and for an urban household it is 500 kWh per year.2
At a global level, the percentage of people with access to electricity has been steadily increasing over the last few decades. In 2000, just under 80% of the world's population had access; this has increased to more than 90%.
This means that around 1-in-10 people in the world does not have access to electricity.
Most of this increase has been driven by growth in low and middle-income economies. In many countries, this trend has been striking.
While this trend has been positive across most regions, there are still some countries where most of the people do not have access to electricity.
In the chart you can explore electrification rates across the world.
How many people don't have access to electricity?
Global access to electricity has been steadily rising in recent decades.
This progress also holds true when we look at the total number of people without electricity access. In 2015, the total number without electricity fell below one billion for the first time in decades; very likely the first time in our history of electricity production.3
This is shown in the chart: in 1998 around 1.4 billion didn't have electricity; by 2015 this had fallen below one billion.
This figure is still unacceptably high — and gains in access are moving much too slow to reach our goal of universal access by 2030. This is particularly true for Sub-Saharan Africa — despite the share of the population with electricity rising steadily, population growth meant that the total number of people without access was on the rise until 2016. Accelerated progress will be needed to ensure this number now continues to fall.
The number of people without access to electricity by region and country
In the chart we see the total number of people without access to electricity, grouped by world region.
Here we see a regional shift in electricity access over the past few decades: in 2000, nearly half of people in the world without access lived in South Asia. This is now less than 15%. Taking its place is Sub-Saharan Africa; it’s home to three-quarters of the world population that don’t have access to electricity.
Access to clean fuels for cooking
What share of people have access to clean fuels for cooking?
The use of solid fuels for cooking is an important risk factor for deaths and morbidity from indoor air pollution.
The obvious way to avoid indoor air pollution from solid fuel burning is for households to transition from traditional ways of cooking and heating towards more modern, cleaner methods. This can, for example, be in the form of transitioning towards non-solid fuels such as natural gas, ethanol or even electric technologies.
In 2020, around 70% of the world had access to clean fuels for cooking. That’s a significant increase from 50% in 2000.
The map shows the share of households with access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking across the world. This share has been increasing for most countries at low-to-middle incomes, however, rates of increase vary by country and region.
Access to clean fuels are still very low across Sub-Saharan Africa. Progress has been much more significant in South Asia and East Asia over the last decade.
How many people do not have access to clean fuels for cooking?
In the visualizations here we see the number of people globally with and without clean cooking fuels, and a world map of the number without access.
The total number of people globally without clean cooking fuels has declined very slowly since 2000.
What share of people use solid fuels for cooking?
The burning of solid fuels fills the houses and huts in poorer countries with smoke that kills the world’s poor by causing pneumonia, stroke, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lung cancer. The solid fuels responsible for this include wood, crop residues, dung, charcoal, and coal. The solution for this problem is straightforward: shift from solid fuels to modern energy sources.
And the following chart shows that the world is making progress in this direction. In 1980 almost two thirds of the world’s population used solid fuels for their cooking. 30 years later this is down to 41%. The chart also shows that it is a problem associated with poverty: In richer Europe and North America the share is much lower than in the rest of the world; and in the high income countries of the world the use of solid fuels is entirely a thing of the past.
The use of solid fuels is going down in all of the world’s regions. But the success rapidly developing South East Asia is particularly impressive: Here the share fell from 95% to 61%.
How does per capita electricity generation vary across the world?
Whilst access to electricity is an important metric to monitor it is insufficient in itself as a true measure of energy equity. Besides the fact that electricity is only one dimension of energy consumption, access metrics don’t tell us about the amount of electricity that’s generated or used.
It doesn’t tell us much about electricity or energy affordability at the individual or household level. Indeed, many households may only consume the minimum threshold of electricity usage necessary to be considered 'electrified' as a result of personal finance constraints.4
In the map we see the differences in average per capita electricity generation across the world.
What becomes clear is the large inequalities which exist between countries. In many low-income countries, per capita electricity generation is more than 100-fold lower than the richest countries.
How does per capita energy consumption vary across the world?
In the map we see differences in per capita energy use; this is inclusive of all dimensions of energy (electricity plus transport and heating). There are several important points to note.
Firstly, there are large inequalities in energy consumption between countries. The average US citizen still consumes more than ten times the energy of the average Indian, 4 to 5 times that of a Brazilian, and three times more than China. The gulf between these and very low-income nations is even greater- a number of low-income nations consume less than 100 kilowatt-hour equivalents per person.
Secondly, global average per capita energy consumption has been consistently increasing.
This growth in per capita energy consumption does, however, vary significantly between countries and regions. Most of the growth in per capita energy consumption over the last few decades has been driven by increased consumption in transitioning middle-income countries, such as China, India and Brazil.
Whilst global energy growth is growing from developing economies, the trend for many high-income nations is a notable decline.
What determines levels of energy access?
Low-income households lack access to electricity and clean fuels
The availability (and affordability) of electricity and clean fuels for cooking is strongly related to income. Poor energy access is strongly tied to having a low income.
In the scatterplots here we see the relationship between access to electricity, and access to clean cooking fuels measured against average income (GDP per capita). In both metrics we see a strong positive correlation: energy access is low in poorer countries, and increases as incomes increase.
Rural households lag behind on energy access
Access to electricity has been increasing globally, with most of this increase coming from low-to-middle income economies. However, access to electricity is not equally distributed between rural and urban demographics.
In the chart we have plotted the percentage of the rural population with electricity access (on the y-axis) versus the percentage of the urban population with access (x-axis).
Countries which lie below the grey line have lower access in rural populations relative to access in urban areas. Nearly all lie below this line, meaning that for most nations electricity access in urban areas is higher than in rural regions.
Endnotes
Also see: Panos, E., Densing, M., Volkart, K. (2016). Access to electricity in the World Energy Council's global energy scenarios: An outlook for developing regions until 2030. Energy Strategy Reviews, 9, 28-49. Available online.
IEA (2016). World Energy Outlook 2016 – Methodology for Energy Access Analysis. Available online.
Although global electricity access data does not extend further back than the year 1990, I hypothesize that 2015 was the first year since the dawn of industrial electricity production that less than a billion have been without access. The global population was already over 1.4 billion by the time of the first power plant (in 1882). In fact, Asia (the world's most populous region) alone was approaching one billion at the end of the 19th century. The rapid development of the world's most populous regions has been focused within the most recent decades in the late 20th and early 21st century. Although the data is not available to confirm this, I would estimate that between 1882 and 1990 there has always been at least one billion people in the world without electricity access.
The minimum levels of consumption necessary to be considered as having electricity access based on International Energy Agency (IEA) methodology is 250kWh per year for rural households, and 500kWh per year for urban households. IEA methodology and definitions available online.
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Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2019) - “Access to Energy” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access' [Online Resource]BibTeX citation
@article{owid-energy-access,
author = {Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado and Max Roser},
title = {Access to Energy},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2019},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access}
}
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