We can be much more energy efficient
An analysis of trends in energy usage
There were a lot of press stories about climate change in 2019. Greta Thunberg’s face appeared to be plastered over every media surface. Catastrophism became rampant.
But how are we really doing? Not that bad actually: compared to the narrative, one country stands out as doing especially well across all metrics. That place is the UK which is probably the best performing developed country in the world when it comes to energy usage and climate change. It’s therefore worthy of study.
Let’s start with electricity usage. The world has been encouraged to conserve energy for a very long time. Is it working?
Here, we can see that starting around 2000 electricity consumption per person stabilised, and in 2005 entered a period of steep decline. The last time there was such a decline in the UK it didn’t last long and was probably caused by the economic turmoil experienced at the end of the 1970s/start of the 80s (e.g. because France saw no such decline).
This trend is so large it offsets population growth. The country uses less energy not just on a per capita basis but as a whole:
The UK has seen unusually massive levels of immigration for a long time now, hence the centrality of that topic in British politics. Between 2005 and 2019 the country officially grew by about 7 million people, or more than 10%!
I say “officially” because sadly, the conflation of immigration control with racism has distorted politics in the UK so badly that the national statistics themselves can’t be trusted. That’s according to the government itself. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, recently made a surprising admission:
“We don’t really know how many people are in the country. Earlier this year, the Office for National Statistics downgraded its immigration statistics to ‘experimental’. In other words, they don’t know how many people are coming into the country or who they are.”
There have been reasons to doubt UK population figures for quite a while and now it’s official. But the ‘experimental’ figures aren’t going to be overestimates, which makes the energy usage pattern even more surprising.
In the poorer country of Thailand electricity usage is steadily climbing. Thailand has a population roughly the same size as the UK, so from a global perspective the decline in British electricity usage is being offset by rising usage there. But what we usually see with such trends is that once a country catches up with rich world living standards its demographic data comes into line, so once the Thai people are as rich as the British they’ll probably start to see dropping electricity usage too.
What’s the cause of this decline?
Firstly, are we simply replacing electricity with other kinds of fossil fuels by e.g. driving more? This possibility sounds all wrong, as outside of electric cars and oil burning power plants electricity and oil aren’t substitutes for each other.
No, we see the same trends in total energy usage, in fact it’s even more pronounced. The UK uses about 1000kg of oil equivalent less per person than it did at the turn of the millennium. That’s a lot! During the 1990s electricity seems to have substituted for other forms of (immediate) energy as energy usage was constant but electricity usage grew, probably as people switched from gas to electric cookers and microwaves.
What about deindustrialisation?
This one is harder to study. One way is to look at more countries, like where I live in Switzerland:
Switzerland sees hardly any decline, just a tiny amount, and has had remarkably stable electricity usage over time. Sweden is a typical post-industrial European country and sees the same pattern of a decline starting in 2005, albeit not as strong. But the real interesting line is Germany, a country famous for still being a major exporter and manufacturer of many different kinds of things. There, electricity usage per capita is completely flat for decades. It’s also nearly half Sweden’s: what are the Swedes doing?!
We see the same for the USA:
Canada sees a small decline, but the USA is flat. Germans and Americans use the same kind of equipment as the British do but manufacture more, so does this suggest we can rule out more efficient energy usage by the Brits and blame it all on a shift from manufacturing to financial services? Maybe the UK is reducing energy per person more than the USA and Germany because we shipped all our energy intensive industries to China and those countries didn’t?
Since 2005 the decline in energy usage is steep but the UK’s position in the world ranking of manufacturers didn’t change much. It starts at about 7th place in 2006 and ends at 9th place in 2016. The top manufacturers are pretty stable: China, USA, Japan, Germany. Lower down countries swap places more. But it’d be odd if moving from 7th to 9th place could cause such a dramatic drop in energy usage.
Maybe the mix of manufacturing has changed? The UK still makes a lot, but makes less energy intensive things than it used to? There’s certainly reason to suspect this:
Aluminium smelting is the industry most sensitive to electricity prices because they use so damn much of it. And now all the UK’s smelters have gone, driven away by high electricity prices caused by decarbonisation policies.
The UK government has had a long term policy of reducing emissions and has dramatically succeeded in that goal, hence why it’s worth studying:
This graph plots three things of interest. The lowest dark blue line plots what we think of as emissions: the amount of CO2 being emitted by burning things in the UK. As can be seen, it’s plummeted since 1990.
The top yellow line is a simple guess at what emissions would have been if nothing about the UK’s energy mix had changed, i.e. what it might look like if nobody knew CO2 caused global warming, or if nobody cared. It’s essentially an extrapolation of population growth.
Going back to the prior graph the most interesting line is the light blue line. This is a guess at how much CO2 would have been emitted if the country was totally self sufficient and had no trade with the outside world. It’s calculated by differencing estimates of the “embodied” CO2 in imports vs exports. I have my doubts about how accurate such an analysis can really be given it comes from a climatologist, and their models have a history of being wrong. But it’s the best we’ve got so let’s assume at least the general trend is right.
Up until the magic year of 2005 domestic emissions were declining, but that was misleading — the burning was just moving abroad. But after 2005 emissions comes into line with energy/electricity usage and goes into steep decline. By 2015 the UK had genuinely forced emissions down below the 1991 starting point including all the stuff that’d moved to China.
So it seems we can rule out deindustrialisation, which at any rate was mostly a pre-millennium thing. The aluminium smelters closing down were caused by a deliberate rise in energy prices, not cheap foreign labour.
What’s going on?
The fact that three different datasets all seem to agree on something happening in 2005 should give us some increased confidence that there’s a real there there. Something fundamentally changed that year and the UK has been the embodiment of a successful fightback against CO2 ever since.
Here’s CarbonBrief’s (really, Zeke Hausfather’s) estimate of the source of the savings. This chart is rather hard to read because it superimposes actual emissions (the big dark area at the bottom) with the savings relative to the estimate of expected “nobody cares” emissions, with the coloured areas showing their overall contribution. As we can see, up until 2005 “lower electricity usage” contributed nothing because electricity usage was rising or flat. Starting in 2005 it grows significantly.
The transition to gas/wind from coal is one of the biggest contributors, but lower (non electricity) energy usage from industry also makes a huge contribution.
The fall in electricity usage is mostly residential and industrial, with commercial properties (shops, offices etc) doing relatively little. Interestingly, CarbonBrief fingers better home insulation as a big contributor although most homes are gas heated. But they also say that in 2011 energy usage was down 20% due to 2011 being a “particularly warm year”. This leads to the observation (though they don’t make it) that there’s a useful feedback loop here — if the climate gets warmer we’d automatically reduce our emissions dramatically, simply due to less need to heat homes!
How the fall in electricity usage is being achieved is mostly a mystery. There are attempts to figure it out but the data isn’t that good and relies a lot on modelling.
Why it’s falling isn’t a mystery though:
Starting in 2005 gas/electricity prices started climbing really steeply. They’ve nearly tripled. This graph looks like our smoking gun. But is it?
Maybe a 15% price rise over a bit less than a decade isn’t enough to make significant changes to electricity usage in the USA (probably general inflation is a chunk of that rise). But in the EU price rises have been particularly steep since 2009. Still nowhere near UK levels but still pretty steep.
So the mystery is not why the UK experienced such huge drops in usage but why Germany didn’t, despite also experiencing big price rises. There’s some evidence that Germans simply don’t care about energy prices, e.g. about half of people asked don’t know their annual power consumption, and about 40% didn’t know how big their bill was. Are the British really so much more concerned about power prices? It’s unlikely to be an industrial issue because wholesale power is extremely cheap in Germany and in fact wholesale prices have collapsed.
It’s hard to understand why Germans haven’t changed their electricity usage. The country is relatively speaking very climate conscious — the huge and heavily publicised Energewende policy of moving to renewables despite large costs is widely supported and not politically questioned. Perhaps that’s even the cause: Germans see no reason to conserve power because they believe it’s coming from green sources anyway (or will soon). Whereas in the UK there’s been less subsidy for renewables and no snappy catchphrased policy that might reassure people there’s no need for change.
Conclusion
The UK has managed a climate and energy turnaround that is one of the most impressive in the world. It’s done this in a way so completely undisruptive that people actually write academic papers trying to figure out how it happened. Big increases in electricity and gas prices haven’t turned into a major political issue, presumably as they’re still too low to matter to most people.
To me this suggests that whatever is happening in the UK can pretty easily be replicated around the world, if it can be figured out and bundled up into a set of policies. And if that is managed then it’s likely the entire western world can pretty dramatically lower its emissions, offsetting the rise by poorer countries that by and large have populations who don’t care. The trick is to avoid petrol taxes: petrol can’t easily be conserved or substituted and so making it more expensive has a history of causing riots in both the UK and France. Electricity and gas are cheaper and easier to conserve.
Happy new year!
