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(13) CommentsEnergy and Income
Jim Trow, our new technical spokesperson, draws our attention to gapminder.org. This software enables us to create a graph that shows the stark connection between energy consumption and poverty.
Click on the graph to visit an interactive version of this chart. With the interactive version, you can hover over the dots to identify the countries, "play" the graph forward and backward through time, and change the parameters of the data.
Each circle represents a country, and the size of the circle represents the size of the population. Yellow countries are in the Americas. Dark blue countries are in Africa. China is the big red circle, India is the big turquoise circle. As you can see, most people on our planet earn less than $4000 per year, and consume less than 4000 kWh of electricity per year.
The USA is the large yellow dot hovering at 14,000 kWh per person, with an average income around 40K. As you can see, Americans consume a lot more energy than the rest of the world.
To our credit, we don't consume the most energy per person. That honor is held by Norway and Iceland, the two dots to the far right of the graph. These folks consume almost twice the energy per person that Americans do.
This graph is linear. It doesn't look as stark when you use a logarithmic scale.
Here's a look at income vs. oil consumption in barrels per year.
According to this graph, Americans drink up 25 barrels of oil per person per year. Folks in Singapore guzzle 74 barrels per person. Wow! The folks in India are at 0.9 barrels per person per year.
The data doesn't tell us what total energy consumption is for electricity and oil - as some of the oil may be used for electricity generation.
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There are (13) comments.This may be getting intensively nitpicky, but this graph may not be inherently meaningful per se. GDP per capita is not as strong an indication of comparative wealth as all that, primarily owing to mainland China and other dollar pegged currencies having artificially low GDP compared to real Purchasing Power Parity. It also follows that energy consumption of all types is limited by income, and that income is not necessarily limited by the ability to use energy, although obviously there would be a strong link in productivity.
More significant metrics would be the absolute levels of poverty and homelessness, and the gini coefficients and other poverty metrics at this site don’t strike me as good measures of that. Life expectancy doesn’t have as strong a linear relationship with energy consumption, but that’s due mostly to sub-Sararan Africa’s appalling AIDS rates.
Just some thoughts.
Yes, I have sent an email to gapminder asking for more meaningful data. This is all they have for now.
So we have this rather crude correlative graph. Still, with the bulk of the world’s population in the lower left corner, and the expectation that they want a lifestyle in the middle commensurate with the USA, it does give you a visual sense of the upward pressure on energy consumption.
But, yes, we’re still on the lookout for better graphic representations of the energy/poverty link.
I think I remember seeing the site founders initial presentation and noting him complain that trying to get accurate statistical metrics out of national and international governing bodies was exceptionally difficult.
I also remember being appalled that he characterized the “Great Leap Forward” as being positive for mainland China instead of a disaster, but he was mostly linking it to life expectancy increases, although one could creditably attribute those to Zhou Enlai and the Deng. Touchy subject, I know… but still…
The energy income graph shows that colder countries (Sweden, Finland, Canada, Norway) use the most kwh, with some wasteful Oil States thrown in (Kuwait, Qatar, etc.) The graph has a “play” function at the bottom, which runs kind of fast to really appreciate it. You can select countries by dot, area, or name (right hand listing) to follow. But more helpful is to manually drag the pointer back and forth; that allows more detailed examination.
Watch Saudi Arabia in particular. Its income surges and then falls back in the 70s, but usage keeps rising.
Well, one assumes that a not insignificant portion of Gulf area energy consumption is desalinization.
True. 14 million m3 of water is desalinized each day, 70% in the Middle East, mostly using distillation (Source). I wonder what the oil to water conversion rate is. E.g., how many barrels of water do you get for each barrel of oil burned?
Sounds like an excellent H.S. physics question! Unfortunately I don’t have the appropriate conversion figures to hand. But they would be:
-Refining energy expenditure
-Power generation expenditure (assuming electric boiling or similar process is used; otherwise it would be the efficiency of burning refined fuel to boil water; also assuming some more intelligent process like the Israeli technologies isn’t used.)
-Brine disposal energy expenditure.
14kwh per 1000 Gallons, the cost being between $3 and $4 per 1000 Gallons depending on the cost of electricity. About 75% of the total costs are energy related.
FF would thus push the electricity cost down by 90-95%, so the cost would be ~80-95 cents per 1000 gallons. Tap water costs on average $2 for 1000 gallons in the US according to one site, of which 15% is the treatment.
So for coastal cities such as New York and LA, FF desalinized freshwater would probably be cost effective compared to aquaduct maintenance, especially as populations increase and capacity must be expanded.
Just noticed that the numbers in the 1st paragraph of the above post just don’t add up…
Yeah; where I am, 14kwh would cost ~90¢. About 5¢ with FF. Do you mean treatment to cover chlorination etc.? If so, that would mean 30¢ treatment, though probably not needed with distilled water, + 5¢ for desalination. So consumer cost would drop by a net 80% minimum.
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