139
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
139 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
58133 readers
4812 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I'm surprised that per capita, the absolute worst is Qatar with 3x the consumption of the US. The average US citizen however consumes ~2x as much as a German, Japanese, Iranian, French or Irish citizen.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=table
The data kinda seems off though. How is an Icelandic citizen using 3x as much as a US citizen? Did they completely get rid of fossil fuels or something?
Qatar and Iceland are both rich nations in an inhospitable climate.
Makes sense they’d be near the top in heating/cooling.
Iceland has so much renewables with water and geothermal, they can use it however they want.
It's not so much about what citizens consume. Per capita energy use is not the same as average household energy use, it's just the total energy consumed divided by population. So it will include industrial consumption.
Iceland produces plentiful electrical energy from hydro and geothermal power. Because electricity was so abundant it was very cheap, and because it was so cheap large energy intensive industry developed, such as aluminium production. Industry consumes the vast majority of electricity in Iceland.
Most of Europe and Japan is pretty mild most of the year. I wouldn't be surprised if a very large chunk of that difference is simply climate, a lot of the USA gets very cold/hot.