Data
Total electricity generation
Ember and Energy Institute
About this data
Total electricity generation
Ember and Energy Institute
Measured in terawatt-hours.
Source
Ember (2024); Energy Institute - Statistical Review of World Energy (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
June 20, 2024
Next expected update
June 2025
Date range
1985–2023
Unit
terawatt-hours
Related research and writing
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
- We rely on Ember as the primary source of electricity data. While the Energy Institute (EI) provides primary energy (not just electricity) consumption data and it provides a longer time-series (dating back to 1965) than Ember (which only dates back to 1990), EI does not provide data for all countries or for all sources of electricity (for example, only Ember provides data on electricity from bioenergy). So, where data from Ember is available for a given country and year, we rely on it as the primary source. We then supplement this with data from EI where data from Ember is not available.
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- All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
- All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.
Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Total electricity generation”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2023) - “Energy”. Data adapted from Ember, Energy Institute. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation [online resource]How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
Ember (2024); Energy Institute - Statistical Review of World Energy (2024) – with major processing by Our World in DataFull citation
Ember (2024); Energy Institute - Statistical Review of World Energy (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Total electricity generation – Ember and Energy Institute” [dataset]. Ember, “Yearly Electricity Data”; Energy Institute, “Statistical Review of World Energy” [original data]. Retrieved April 6, 2025 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation