Share of electricity produced from coal:EU,US,UK and China

26 comments
  1. Three comments why the graph is misleading to many:
    1. Relative numbers tell only a small part of the story. Here is the same graph with absolute numbers https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-coal?tab=chart&time=earliest..latest&country=USA~IND~ZAF~JPN~DEU~SWE~EU-27~CHN~OWID_WRL.
    2. Many of the coal intensive industries have shifted from EU/US to Asia. They are producing our goods and gadgets.
    3. Electricity is of course just part of the story. When looking at decarbonization, we should be looking at the absolute energy produced by source.

  2. Blows my mind that less than a decade ago 40% of electricity was produced from coal in US and UK. For some reason I always thought it was much less.

  3. That drop from 22% in 2015 to 9% in 2016 is crazy and all it took was the government setting a deadline to end coal by 2025 (now revised to 2024).

  4. Not the most informative graph. China may have reduced their share of coal electricity but in absolute numbers it keeps hitting new records every year.

  5. Would be interesting to see the whole data since industrial revolution and not started somewhere in the 90s

  6. Share is probably not a good unit in this case. Perhaps absolute numbers in TWh would be better.

    China, for instance, increased it’s energy production from 500 TWh in 1985 to more than 7000 TWh in 2020. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China)

    So from 2004, where 1,700 TWh where made from coal, it went up to 4,500 TWh.

    For the UK, on the other hand, coal consumption dropped from 3 quadrillion BTU down to ~1.2 quadrillion BTU.

  7. Based, from single digits to almost half of our electricity being renewable in just a decade, apparently we got one thing right, makes a nice change, this is one thing I’m very proud of.

  8. Why electricity production from coal dropped so much, even before people became concerned with global warming? Isn’t that the cheapest source?

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