How much electricity is needed to unlock prosperity in today's LMICs?
A bottom-up look at firm-side and household-side electricity demand for prosperous lower- and middle-income countries.
The setup
Two sides of the same story.
Firm side
Six sub-sectors power the economy
- Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing
- Manufacturing
- Mining & Quarrying
- Construction
- Transportation
- Commercial & Public Services
Each archetype borrows a developed economy's sector-level energy intensity. Multiplied by sector GVA and electrification share.
Household side
Six domains power daily life
- Lighting
- Refrigeration
- HVAC (heating & cooling)
- Cooking
- Mobility
- Other appliances
Each domain computed as kWh per household per year, scaled by the projected number of households.
Lower- and middle-income countries together will need, on average…
Population-weighted across 130 lower- and middle-income countries at convergence.
The spread
But "LMIC" hides a wide range — eight archetypes diverge by up to ~60%.
LMIC average is a population-weighted mean of all member countries.
The build-up
How the 7.03 number gets there — domain by domain.
Tune the picture
What does prosperity look like under different assumptions?
The headline rests on a few dozen choices about how rich, how mobile, how efficient, and how electrified prosperous LMICs become. Pull any lever — the strip below and the build-up above redraw live.
Reshape the archetypes
Who does each archetype actually look like?
Each LMIC archetype borrows its sector-level energy intensity from a developed economy. Reassign the references — does Nigeria's manufacturing look more like Germany's or Japan's? — and watch the firm-side build-up shift. Electrification share for each sub-sector sits above its column.
Research roadmap
What we're refining next.
Household-side refinements
Vehicle adoption logic
Refine the per-household vehicle count formula, the car-to-two-wheeler split, and the assumptions feeding total km driven per year.
Household-size projections
Move beyond exponential decline to a more demographically informed model that distinguishes share of adults vs children per household.
Rural–urban shift
Bring forward analysis of how the rural population share evolves to 2050, since urbanization reshapes dwelling, mobility, and cooking profiles.
Appliance benchmark interpolation
Replace the current step-function bundles with formulas that smoothly interpolate between income-level benchmarks.
Firm-side refinements
LMIC archetype assignments
Second pass on which countries map to which of the eight archetypes, with finer-grained criteria where current fits are weak.
Developed-country reference pool
Add a few additional reference economies in sub-sectors where current matches produced poor fits.
Sensitivities & extensions
Desalination demand
Find a solution for water-driven electricity demand, particularly the agriculture share. This is currently switched off in the model.
Appliance pricing
Deeper sensitivity work on appliance unit costs feeding the per-capita-GDP affordability calculation.
Affordability threshold
Stress-test the 12% household-income threshold to ensure we land somewhere fully defensible in terms of what prosperous households can credibly afford to spend on the bundle.
Sources · UN DESA · IEA · Odyssee-Mure · WRI Aqueduct · World Bank WDI · national statistical agencies.