Electricity generation per person in the United Kingdom has fallen by a third from its early-2000s peak.
Globally, electricity generation per person has grown by more than 50% this century.
In the United Kingdom, things have moved in the opposite direction. Its generation per person peaked in 2003 and has fallen by more than a third since then.
You can see this in the chart, which shows generation per person since 1920. Today, levels are back to where they were in the late 1960s.
Some of that decline is a change in electricity imports, rather than demand: net imports have increased from 1% of electricity demand in 2010 to 9% in 2025. But it’s still true that the UK consumes much less electricity than it used to.
The most common explanation is deindustrialization: as the economy shifted from manufacturing to services, electricity demand fell. That’s part of the explanation, but far from all of it.
Sectoral data from the International Energy Agency confirms that electricity consumption in industry has fallen by one-quarter since 2005 (more if we calculate this per person). But residential and commercial electricity use has fallen by just as much.
Deindustrialization has reduced demand, but improvements in energy efficiency — such as the shift from incandescent to LED lightbulbs and the introduction of efficiency standards for appliances — have played an important role too.
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