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%.
Archetype totals are population-weighted means of all member countries. Some archetypes (DRC, Indonesia) carry far higher demand per capita due to industrial mix and climate.
The build-up
How the 7.30 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.
What we held constant
What's frozen — and what's coming next.
Frozen reference data
UN DESA 2050 population (the only year drawn from this source), CDD/HDD per country, World Bank rural population share, country-region crosswalk, historical developed-country sub-sector energy intensities, per-archetype sub-sector GDP shares, VAT/subsidy shares, water-stress reference data.
Exposed for live exploration
The 10 sliders in "Tune the picture"; the 48-cell archetype matrix; the 6 per-sub-sector electrification shares.
Coming next
Desalination demand — the underlying model can compute it per-country, but v1 does not surface it. To be re-introduced as a toggle plus a per-country water-stress overlay in v2. Also under consideration: per-country drill-down beyond the focus dropdown, climate-scenario sensitivity, per-archetype GDP-share rebalancing.
Sources · UN DESA · IEA · Odyssee-Mure · WRI Aqueduct · World Bank WDI · national statistical agencies.