Census from Heaven: An Estimate of Global Electricity Demand “if Everyone Lived Like in OECD”

How much electricity does the world really need? Economic theory suggests that electricity demand depends on a number of factors such as per capita income, economic output, supply and cost of electricity. However, formal electricity demand models based on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), population growth and efficiency improvement assumptions may not capture the appropriate variables for responses at high geographical resolution level and, as a result, may be quite wrong about the prospective electricity need. This study proposed a method and then implemented it for the question of whether luminosity (measures of nighttime lights visible from space) could be used to improve estimates of electricity prospective demand in non-OECD countries at the high geographical resolution. Further, we investigated whether luminosity may serve as a proxy for electricity consumption. Luminosity data has an advantage over other proxies as night lights data are available over time and all space, but data on electricity consumption are unavailable for many lower income countries and generally are unavailable for most countries at sub-national levels. To the extent that luminosity is a good proxy for electricity consumption, we evaluated how much electricity the world would likely demand “if everyone lived like in OECD countries”.