A pleasant surprise about energy consumption

Daily Data: Peak energy is a lot farther away than you think

• energy peaked when you’d least expect it

• efficiency, offshoring or something else?

• data centers already showing up in the power grid

• but if got efficient once, why not twice?

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A pleasant surprise about energy consumption

So Random Walk learned something new about energy consumption that seems too crazy to believe.

Before you look at the answer, try to guess when US energy consumption peaked:

Did you guess?

Behold, the answer!

According to the EIA, US energy consumption peaked in 2007, with 99 quadrillion British thermal units consumed:

EIA

Current energy consumption is about the same as it was back in the late 90s.

That’s incredible.

To repeat, as a nation, we’re consuming about the same amount of energy as we did 25+ years ago (according to the EIA). I knew that growth and oil usage decoupled a while back, but I wasn’t expecting this.

Putting aside the additional ~30 million people we’ve added since then, if you think of all the electronics, and networked devices, and stuff, and second-homes, and all of that, it’s just a remarkable observation.

How is it possible that we’ve managed to reduce energy consumption by quite so much?