California Energy Consumption Compared to US and World – California Globe

As we celebrate one of America’s most beautiful traditions this week, we are certainly grateful for the energy we often take for granted. In America we are particularly fortunate because the energy we use is almost always reliable and plentiful. How plentiful? Here are some numbers.

Most energy economists report all forms of energy production and consumption in joules. One joule is one watt-second, which means 3.6 million joules correspond to one kilowatt hour. Gigajoules (1 million joules) are used to report energy consumption per capita per year. When measuring very large amounts of energy consumption per year, for example for states and nations, exajoules are used. An exajoule is a billion gigajoules or a trillion joules. For comparison, note that one exajoule is the energy equivalent of 278,000 gigawatt hours.

If you find this boring and abstruse, relax. To quantify how grateful we should be that we live in America, proportions are key.

Total global primary energy use in 2023 – this is the energy contained in all fuels; Coal, gas, oil, nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal and biomass – estimated at 604 exajoules. The United States accounted for 96 exajoules (16 percent) and California accounted for 7.1 exajoules (1.2 percent). But here’s where things get interesting.

If you look at per capita energy consumption, clear contrasts emerge. People in the United States had a per capita energy consumption of 285 gigajoules in 2023, while people in the rest of the world had a per capita energy consumption of 75.3 gigajoules. Talk about disproportionality. Americans use more than four times as much energy per person as people in the rest of the world.

This simple distinction, the difference between total energy consumption and per capita energy consumption, is often lost on those who criticize China’s energy footprint, for example. The reason China produces more pollution is because China’s annual primary energy use is 153 exajoules, 67 percent more than the United States. However, China’s per capita energy consumption was only 133 gigajoules. Americans use 2.5 times as much energy per person as someone living in China.

To fully appreciate the disproportionate gift of energy that Americans enjoy, consider the African continent. With a population of 1.5 billion people, roughly equivalent to the population of China, they used only 20 exajoules of energy in 2023. This corresponds to a per capita energy consumption of 13.3 gigajoules. The average American uses more than 21 times as much energy as the average African.

In general, the more energy a person can use, the higher their income is. So what is a realistic target for per capita energy consumption by 2025, when the world population is estimated to level off at around 9.4 billion people? For everyone to use as much energy as Americans, total global primary energy use would have to reach 2,689 exajoules, which is 4.5 times what we currently produce. Without an extraordinary breakthrough in energy technology within the next 20 years, this is likely impossible. But what about California?

Maybe it’s just our mild climate, or maybe it’s the billions we’ve invested in energy efficiency, but Californians only consume 192 gigajoules of energy per capita per year. This surprised me, but it works. Californians use 35 percent less energy per person than the average American in the other 49 states.

This is an encouraging fact. This means that if every person on earth consumed as much energy as the average Californian, global energy production would “only” have to increase to 1,810 exajoules per year, i.e. “only” three times the current global production. But the story doesn’t end there.

Primary energy inputs refer to raw fuels, be it oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear energy, hydropower or renewable energy. All of these raw materials must be converted into a practical, transportable fuel, and that fuel must then be converted into something useful – light, heating, cooling, communications, computers, mobility. Energy is lost at every step of these transformations. A natural gas power plant loses energy by spinning a turbine to produce electricity. A gasoline engine loses energy and converts combustion into actual power.

Currently only around 40 percent of primary energy input is actually used as useful energy. What if we could increase that to 80 percent? That’s an ambitious goal, but some applications are already achieving it. An electric vehicle charged with electricity generated by photovoltaics causes losses in transmission, battery charging, battery discharging, and conversion of electricity into traction by the motor. But overall, more than 80 percent of the original photovoltaic electricity ends up on the road in the form of horsepower.

To illustrate, what if our energy industry was 80 percent efficient at converting raw energy into usable energy, instead of just 40 percent? In this scenario, global primary energy use would only need to increase to 905 exajoules per year for everyone on Earth to have the same per capita access to usable energy. That’s just 50 percent more than we used in 2023, and we still have just over two decades to reach this goal. This is within the scope of what is possible.

We can be grateful that today in America we have the best access to energy in the world, and we can be grateful that we live in California, the global epicenter of innovation. If anyone can figure out how to deliver affordable, sustainable, and abundant energy to everyone in the world, it’s us.