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>The consumption probably grew due to Asia and Africa using more electricity, but in the western world?

Fair, looking at more recent data it looks like between 2008 and 2017 the US has bounced back and forth about 100 TWh in total use.

BUT if you look at things like Bitcoin... one estimate ( https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/new-study-quanti... ) put the Bitcoin network alone using 30-70 TWh a year.

If we look at https://yearbook.enerdata.net/ we see more recent data and yeah the biggest culprit is Asia with 1-3% increases each year. I imagine a good chunk of this is manufacturing for 'first world' countries though which one could argue should be assigned to the countries being exported to not the country doing the manufacturing but that's going to be way too complicated to estimate. I work in international freight and I've definitely seen freight grow in the past decade, especially Asia (if we exclude the past few months with Section 301 and China) and if EVs start to catch on in the next 5-10 years you'll likely see a large jump in actual electrical demand as well.

The middle east is consistently growing, I'm guessing a lot of that isn't 'third world' areas though and more likely cities like Dubai.

Something to keep in mind though is global warming, if budgets allow I imagine we're going to see cost of cooling increase in the coming years.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Co...

In 2016 the total US consumption of electricity was 4,137.1 terawatt-hours (TWh).


"bounced back and forth about 100 TWh" as in on year 4000, one year 3900, one year 4100.


Oh, OK, I misunderstood.


I figured :)




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