Why energy matters
Electricity is not one sector among many. It is the input to all the others.
How much electricity a country has decides what it can build
Most people picture electricity as keeping the lights on. Lighting is a tiny part of it. What the meter really measures is steel, fertiliser, clean water, hospitals and phone networks. So how much a country uses per person says more about what it can do than almost any other single number.
So it matters that countries do not have remotely similar amounts of it. Here is the range, from one of the highest in the world to one of the lowest.
What the difference actually buys:
- Making things. Melting metal takes more electricity than almost anything else people do: about 5,000 kWh for a tonne of steel, three times that for aluminium. Countries without cheap power do not make these things. They buy them from countries that do.
- Food. The fertiliser that grows it, the pumps that water it, and the fridges and refrigerated lorries that get it to a shop before it spoils. Where the power is short, less food is grown and more of it is lost on the way.
- Hospitals. An operating theatre, an incubator or a ventilator cannot stop when the power does, and neither can the fridge holding the vaccines.
- Clean water. It has to be pumped, cleaned, and in dry countries made out of seawater. All of that runs on electricity. Where the power is unreliable, so is the tap.
- Everything on a phone. Mobile networks, banking, and every app and site people use all day. All of it is electricity, running in buildings most of us never see.
When electricity gets expensive, everything does
Russia began reducing gas deliveries to Europe in 2021 and cut them outright after invading Ukraine in 2022. European wholesale gas went from about €20/MWh in early 2021 to more than €300 at the peak in August 2022.
Gas sets the electricity price in most European markets, so the rise did not stay in the gas market. Fertiliser is made from gas, so food got more expensive. Aluminium and chemicals are made with electricity, so those plants shut. Household bills in Germany went from roughly €100 a month to several times that, and energy poverty stopped being a technical term.
Whoever supplies your energy gets a say in your politics
This is not a theory about bad actors. It is what happens whenever one side of a trade can survive its interruption and the other cannot.
France and Germany chose differently, and both still live with it
After the 1973 embargo France built more than 50 reactors in 25 years. After Fukushima in 2011 Germany decided to close the reactors it had. Neither choice could be undone by a later government, because power stations outlast the parliaments that order them. Which is why it is worth looking at the two grids as they actually ran, rather than at what either country said it was doing.
Four questions, and four answers that should worry you
Everything above is background. This is the part worth keeping: what to ask when someone tells you what your grid should do next.
Those questions work because there is no source without a cost. Anyone who tells you their option has no trade-off is selling something.
| Source | What it gives you | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Coal | Cheap, available almost everywhere, runs whenever you need it | The highest emissions on the grid, and the local air |
| Gas | Flexible, quick to build, cleaner than coal | Still fossil, and usually somebody else’s gas |
| Nuclear | Runs day and night for decades, very little carbon, very little land | Slow and expensive to build, waste, imported fuel |
| Wind and solar | The cheapest new generation there has ever been | Only when the weather agrees, so storage, grid and backup |
| Hydro | Clean, runs on demand, and the only way we can store power in bulk today | You need the geography, and rivers have other claims on them |
The argument is general. Your grid is not.
Each of the 201 countries on this site has its own page, its own mix and its own dependencies, and most of them are not what people assume. Pick one you think you already know.