In 2022, consumption of primary energy per capita in the United Stated amounted to 284 million British thermal units. Per capita consumption of energy has increased since the 1950s in the United States. However, in the advent of vehicle and electricity efficiency standards, per capita consumption has decreased in recent years.

Alaska's staggering energy consumption of 987.4 million British thermal units per capita in 2022 highlights the vast disparities in energy use across the United States. This figure, more than triple the national average of 284.4 million British thermal units, underscores the unique energy demand of America's largest state. Louisiana and North Dakota followed closely behind, with consumption rates of 925.4 and 861 million British thermal units per capita, respectively. Factors influencing regional U.S. energy consumption The extreme per person energy consumption in Alaska can be attributed to its cold climate and energy-intensive industries. By comparison, New York, California, and Florida were among the states with the lowest per person energy consumption in the country because of the high energy efficiency, mild temperatures, and economies based on services and low-energy intensive industries. The overall energy consumption in the U.S. states was highest in the most populated areas –Texas, California, and Florida- and lower in sparsely populated ones, such as Alaska and Wyoming. Future energy trends in the U.S. While individual states show significant variations, the U.S. country consumed approximately 93.58 quadrillion British thermal units of primary energy in 2023, a slight decrease from the previous year. Oil remained the dominant energy source, followed by natural gas and renewable energies. The country's energy market has been evolving, with increased investments in renewable energy, reflecting a growing shift towards more sustainable energy sources.

Iceland is by far the largest per capita consumer of electricity worldwide, averaging 51.9 megawatt-hours per person in 2024. This results from a combination of factors, such as low-cost electricity production, increased heating demand, and the presence of energy-intensive industries in the country. Norway, Qatar, and Canada were also some of the world's largest electricity consumers per capita that year. China is the leading overall power consumer Power-intensive industries, the purchasing power of the average citizen, household size, and general power efficiency standards all contribute to the amount of electricity that is consumed per person every year. However, in terms of total electricity consumption, a country's size and population can also play an important role. In 2024, the three most populous countries in the world, namely China, the United States, and India, were also the three largest electricity consumers. Global electricity consumption on the rise In 2023, net electricity consumption worldwide amounted to over 27,000 terawatt-hours, an increase of 30 percent in comparison to a decade earlier. When compared to 1980, global electricity consumption more than tripled. On the generation side, the world is still strongly dependent on fossil fuels. Despite the world's renewable energy capacity quintupling in the last decade, coal and gas combined still accounted for almost 60 percent of global electricity generation in 2023.

United States US: Energy Use: Kg of Oil Equivalent per Capita data was reported at 6,797.621 kg in 2015. This records a decrease from the previous number of 6,955.524 kg for 2014. United States US: Energy Use: Kg of Oil Equivalent per Capita data is updated yearly, averaging 7,651.901 kg from Dec 1960 (Median) to 2015, with 56 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 8,438.403 kg in 1978 and a record low of 5,612.080 kg in 1961. United States US: Energy Use: Kg of Oil Equivalent per Capita data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s USA – Table US.World Bank: Energy Production and Consumption. Energy use refers to use of primary energy before transformation to other end-use fuels, which is equal to indigenous production plus imports and stock changes, minus exports and fuels supplied to ships and aircraft engaged in international transport.; ; IEA Statistics © OECD/IEA 2014 (http://www.iea.org/stats/index.asp), subject to https://www.iea.org/t&c/termsandconditions/; Weighted average; Restricted use: Please contact the International Energy Agency for third-party use of these data.

United States Primary Energy Consumption per Capita data was reported at 77,027.836 kWh/Person in 2023. This records a decrease from the previous number of 78,347.914 kWh/Person for 2022. United States Primary Energy Consumption per Capita data is updated yearly, averaging 89,404.797 kWh/Person from Dec 1965 (Median) to 2023, with 59 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 98,110.680 kWh/Person in 1973 and a record low of 73,294.336 kWh/Person in 2020. United States Primary Energy Consumption per Capita data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Our World in Data. The data is categorized under Global Database’s United States – Table US.OWID.ESG: Environmental: CO2 and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Annual.

Forecast: Primary Energy Consumption Per Capita in the US 2022 - 2026 Discover more data with ReportLinker!

Rhode Island was the U.S. state with the lowest per capita energy consumption in 2022, with an energy consumption that amounted to about 171 million British thermal units per capita. The national average in the U.S. that year was an energy consumption of 284.4 million British thermal units per capita.

The index score of per capita energy consumption in the United States stood at 0.9 in 2017, compared with a baseline of 1 in 2005. Energy demand per person in the United States declined largely due to an increase in appliance and vehicle efficiency standards. The per capita energy consumption varies widely across the United States with Louisiana being one of the highest per capita consumers of energy. Primary energy consumption per capita in the United States totaled 309 million British thermal units in 2018. Over the last decades, energy consumption also tended to decrease during times of economic recession. Energy intensity can act as an indicator of how closely energy consumption is linked to the economy.

Energy consumption in the U.S. There are five sectors in the United States that consume energy, including the industrial sector, transportation sector, residential sector, commercial sector, and electric power sector. These sectors consume primary energy, which is the energy form that has been directly harvested from natural resources. Energy consumption in the United States has not grown as quickly as expected, perhaps due to shifting to offshore manufacturing centers as well as technological advancements.

Graph and download economic data for Per Capita Personal Consumption Expenditures: Nondurable Goods: Gasoline and Other Energy Goods for New York (NYPCEPCGAS) from 1997 to 2023 about nondurable goods, energy, gas, PCE, NY, consumption expenditures, per capita, consumption, personal, goods, and USA.

Graph and download economic data for Per Capita Personal Consumption Expenditures: Nondurable Goods: Gasoline and Other Energy Goods for United States (USPCEPCGAS) from 1997 to 2023 about nondurable goods, energy, gas, PCE, consumption expenditures, per capita, consumption, personal, goods, and USA.

This scatter chart displays fossil fuel energy consumption (% of total) against health expenditure per capita (current US$) in the United Kingdom. The data is about countries per year.

The average for 2015 based on 1 countries was 2016.69 kilograms of oil equivalent. The highest value was in Chile: 2016.69 kilograms of oil equivalent and the lowest value was in Chile: 2016.69 kilograms of oil equivalent. The indicator is available from 1960 to 2015. Below is a chart for all countries where data are available.

This dataset is about countries per year in the United States. It has 64 rows. It features 4 columns: country, fossil fuel energy consumption, and health expenditure per capita.

United States US: Electric Power Consumption: per Capita data was reported at 12,984.333 kWh in 2014. This records a decrease from the previous number of 12,996.845 kWh for 2013. United States US: Electric Power Consumption: per Capita data is updated yearly, averaging 10,886.858 kWh from Dec 1960 (Median) to 2014, with 55 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 13,704.577 kWh in 2005 and a record low of 4,049.787 kWh in 1960. United States US: Electric Power Consumption: per Capita data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s United States – Table US.World Bank.WDI: Energy Production and Consumption. Electric power consumption measures the production of power plants and combined heat and power plants less transmission, distribution, and transformation losses and own use by heat and power plants.; ; IEA Statistics © OECD/IEA 2014 (http://www.iea.org/stats/index.asp), subject to https://www.iea.org/t&c/termsandconditions/; Weighted average; Restricted use: Please contact the International Energy Agency for third-party use of these data.

This scatter chart displays fossil fuel energy consumption (% of total) against health expenditure per capita (current US$) in Central America. The data is about countries.

This scatter chart displays fossil fuel energy consumption (% of total) against health expenditure per capita (current US$) in the Americas. The data is about regions.

The per capita energy consumption in Alaska has been growing over the past few years, and it peaked at over 987 million British thermal units in 2022. Alaska had the highest per capita energy consumption of any state in the United States in 2022. This was more than three times the U.S. average, which stood at 284 million British thermal units.

Graph and download economic data for Per Capita Personal Consumption Expenditures: Nondurable Goods: Gasoline and Other Energy Goods for Illinois (ILPCEPCGAS) from 1997 to 2023 about nondurable goods, energy, IL, gas, PCE, consumption expenditures, per capita, consumption, personal, goods, and USA.

Understanding the residential energy consumption patterns across multiple income groups under decarbonization scenarios is crucial for designing equitable and effective energy policies that address climate change while minimizing disparities. This dataset is developed using an integrated human-Earth system model, supported by the Grid Operations, Decarbonization, Environmental and Energy Equity Platform (GODEEEP) Investment at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

GCAM-USA operates within the Global Change Analysis Model, which represents the behavior of, and interactions between, different sectors or systems, including the energy system, the economy, agriculture and land use, water, and the climate. GCAM is one of only a few integrated global human-Earth system models, also known as Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), which address key processes in inter-linked human and earth systems and provide insights into future global environmental change under alternative scenarios (IAMC, 2022).

GCAM has global coverage with varying spatial disaggregation depending on the type of system being modeled. For energy and economy systems, 32 regions across the globe, including the USA as its own region, are modeled in GCAM. GCAM-USA advances with greater spatial detail in the USA region, which includes 50 States plus the District of Columbia (hereinafter “state”). The core operating principle for GCAM and GCAM-USA is market equilibrium. The model solves every market simultaneously at each time step where supply equals demand and prices are endogenous in the model. The official documentation of GCAM and GCAM-USA can be found at: https://jgcri.github.io/gcam-doc/toc.html

The dataset included in this repository is based on an improved version of GCAM-USA v6, where multiple consumer groups, differentiated by the average income level for 10 population deciles, are represented in the residential building energy sector. As of May 15, 2023, the latest officially released version of GCAM-USA has a single consumer (represented by average GDP per capita) in the residential sector and thus does not include this feature. This multiple-consumer feature is important because (1) demand for residential floorspace and energy are non-linear in income, so modeling more income groups improves the representation of total demand and (2) this feature allows us to explore the distributional effects of policies on these different income groups and the resulting disparity across the groups in terms of residential energy security. If you need more information, please contact the corresponding author.

Here, we ran GCAM-USA with the multiple-consumer feature described above under four scenarios over 2015-2045 (Table 1), including two business-as-usual scenarios and two decarbonization scenarios (with and without the impacts of climate change on heating and cooling demand). This repository contains the key output variables related to the residential building energy sector under the four scenarios, including:

• income shares by consumer groups at each state over 2015-2045 (Casper et al. 2022)
• residential energy consumption per capita by service and fuel, by state and income group, 2015-2045
• residential energy service output (energy consumption * technology efficiency) per capita by service, fuel, and technology, by state and income group, 2015-2045
• estimated energy burden (Eq.1), by state and income group, 2015-2045
• residential heating service inequality (Eq.2), by state, 2015-2045

Table 1

Eq. 1

\(Energy\ burden_i = \dfrac{\sum_j (service\ output_{i,j} * service\ cost_j)}{GDP_i}\)

for income group i and service j

Eq. 2

\(Residential\ heating\ service\ inequality = \dfrac{S_{d10}}{(S_{d1} +S_{d2} + S_{d3} + S_{d4})}\)

where S is the residential heating service output per capita of the highest income group (d10) divided by the sum of that of the lowest four income groups (d1, d2, d3, and d4), similar to the Palma ratio often used for measuring income inequality. A higher Palma ratio indicates a greater degree of inequality.

Reference

Casper, Kelly, Narayan, Kanishka B., O'Neill, Brian C., & Waldhoff, Stephanie. 2022. State level income distributions for net income deciles for the US for historical years (2011-2014) and projections for different SSP scenarios (2015-2100) (latest version obtained from the authors on April 6, 2023) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7227128

IAMC. 2022. The common Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) documentation [Online]. Integrated Assessment Consortium. Available: https://www.iamcdocumentation.eu/index.php/IAMC_wiki [Accessed May 2023].

This research was supported by the Grid Operations, Decarbonization, Environmental and Energy Equity Platform (GODEEEP) Investment, under the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

PNNL is a multi-program national laboratory operated for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) by Battelle Memorial Institute under Contract No. DE-AC05-76RL01830.

Graph and download economic data for Per Capita Personal Consumption Expenditures: Nondurable Goods: Gasoline and Other Energy Goods for Alabama (ALPCEPCGAS) from 1997 to 2023 about nondurable goods, AL, energy, gas, PCE, consumption expenditures, per capita, consumption, personal, goods, and USA.