energy

Understanding Energy Demand: From Growth to the Grid

Ufuk Safak

04 Nov 2025 — 13 min read

I have been obsessively reading and listening to content about the energy sector, clean energy etc.

What you are about to read is my effort to organize my thoughts and make sense of what I’ve learned over the years.

I am neither a radical environmentalist nor ruthless capitalist, and would like to stay in engineering and optimization mindset for such complex civilization problems.

Before we dive into charts and graphs, here are the questions I keep thinking:

Why is electrification advertised as the major solution to the energy crisis?
Why can’t we just consume less instead of keeping on growing?
Why everything is actually up to economy and incentives?

Meaning of energy

The capacity to do work!

I don't think we need to deep dive into what "energy" means. To literally do anything, we need an energy transformation. Thinking is energy transformation from food you eat to your brain cells, and brain cells connecting each other by neural cells to come up with an idea. And your fingers are consuming energy to write those ideas down. If it’s paper, it didn’t appear on your desk by magic. If it’s a computer, it doesn’t save all your files to the cloud for free. So, everything happening in this world can be formulized as energy transformation.

And most of the things happening in civilization started to consume way more energy than it used to be.

If you walk to your office for 30 minutes, that’s energy transformed from your muscles. You might need to eat slightly more than usual to compensate that energy sufficieny.
If you bike instead, you are still using your muscles but this time with a technology named wheel. Wheel makes it faster by consuming dense energy in shorter time.
But if you drive to your office in a one-ton car and do it in 5 minutes instead of 30, you’re buying 25 minutes of time by paying for gasoline, diesel, or maybe electricity. But carrying a tone of metal with you always means you need to spend more energy.

It is just one example. With paced lifestyle we started to consume more energy as it was endless to buy some prosperity. So, we are boosting our energy demand.

What "Energy demand" really means

When experts talk about energy demand, they mean all kinds of energy, not just electricity. But as I am an electronics engineer, I am going to shift this post focus to electrification, but not now!

Energy demand is an almost perfect measurement of economic growth. You can see economic growth of China from energy demand perspective:

Credit: Global Data. Graph taken from this post

You can see that parallel lines. More factories, transportation and consumption needs more energy.

Do we have good examples of economic growth with steady energy supply?

This chart above is great chart to understand GDP and energy demand relations!

Did I get sponsorship from Our World in Data? No, I didn't actually 😄

Especially for a developing country, keeping up with energy demand is pretty crucial. Despite this rule of thumb, some developed western societies managed to grow economically while keeping their energy usage flat. You can read that blog about Sweden energy usage vs GDP per capita. Or just look at the graph:

That doesn’t mean we’re off the hook globally. Many countries still need to increase their energy use to develop. And flat energy use in rich countries sometimes hides off-shored manufacturing or other accounting tricks.
But as a proof of concept, it’s still helpful for our discussion.

And of course, Sweden is always an interesting case in the energy world — they’re green in every map 😄

I’ve been living here in Sweden for three years, and they really do take energy efficiency seriously, especially compared to Turkey, where I’m originally from.

Secret heroes of Civilization

But there are no viral headlines about power grids or transmission efficiency, but without them, everything else collapses.

Instead, we keep talking about gaming startups, SaaS platforms, artificial intelligence, and so on. Ironically, AI itself has become such a massive energy consumer that we started to talk about energy sector more and more.

I would say energy sector is kind of secret hero of society. They are the quiet infrastructure of civilization. You’d be surprised how well-organized system they created to keep us lit, warm and moving.

Energy and the Climate Crisis

So we either need to leave growth mindset behind or keep supplying to energy demand. But we also have another urgent problem: Climate crisis.

That means we need to keep playing the growth game carefully, without damaging our planet. That's the point of most of the current discussions. Let's try to zoom in to greenhouse gas emissions of energy.

To emphasize how big impact energy sector has, let's check percentages by usage:

To understand the scale, here you can see a graph of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) by sector:

I think that second graphs is easier to understand (sometimes pie charts make more sense:):

And, I am going to zoom into energy pie chart for you:

From that data, you can see that residential buildings under “Electricity and Heat” account for around 7.5% of global emissions, while road transportation contributes about 12%.

The Carbon Footprint of Residential Life

It’s not an easy question to answer precisely, but I personally believe many of our environmental challenges should be solved at the household level first.

If some people claim that “we need to reduce population” to save the planet (which sounds like the plot of every dystopian sci-fi movie 😄), then perhaps the more practical approach is to start from home — with better incentives, smarter consumption, and more conscious design.

I found another good article, and it is nice summary of how residential life affects GHG emissions.

We found that over 20% of all U.S. emissions are directly attributed to household consumption. If you consider indirect emissions, this figure is closer to 80%. — Source: Study on U.S. household emissions

A household’s carbon footprint generally increases with its income, ranging from 19.3 to 91.5 tons of CO2-equivalent annually. The average carbon footprint of the wealthiest households is over five times that of the poorest. — Source: Study on U.S. household emissions

So, I believe it is not hard to see the biggest red rectangulars here: Utility, Fuels and food at home.

So, it is a big bold claim but we should look at the world from energy perspective If we want to live here, peacefully.

I would encourage you to think about it. Try to calculate where and how you spend the most energy in your daily life. A couple of helper questions:

Have you ever feel cold at home in winter? It is a good luxury of developed societies that we feel safe about cold. But my apartment was 25 degrees last year with a very good insulation but also very hot radiators. This year, within new apartment I still don't know exactly how they are heating our apartment but they said it is going to stay around 21 degree and it should be enough. I realized it really is enough.

I believe cold has almost nothing to do with being sick. As we moved from Malmö to eslöv (very small town) I realized we skipped first sickness period of autumn. Very likely reason is my son's school, they like to spend time outside and as I said it is very small town 😄 I went from living in a city of 16 million to one of 600 thousand — and now just 30 thousand this winter.

Do you walk daily? Can you walk to your workplace? If not, what if there’s a regulation in the future limiting daily commuting?
- NOTE: Walking is very healthy habit 😄
Do you cook for yourself? Actually here I believe there is a dilemma between eating healtily and eating with less emission. Nice article about that dilemma.

Ok, let's keep digging into energy sector. You now understand how hyperactive brain I had 😦

Energy types

As you can see, gas, coal and oil are still supplying a big portion of our energy demand. But that graph is probably country general all energy. Let's check electricity production graph to get in today's context ( I am electronics engineer):

We still have coal at the top of it 😄 And gas, and hydropower, wind and so on. And here is the same data from another aspect:

It clearly shows that coal and gas is still growing, while oil and nuclear seems steady and all renewable energies are booming. You can check the numbers for your country. I checked Sweden and Turkey and a couple of others relevant comparison:

So, it means Sweden did a good job to electrify all energy demand. Is it?

So, Sweden is roughly %20 electrified. While Turkey is %10 and USA is %10. And so on.

And I am no authority on those topics, but they are saying to accomplish clean energy transformation we need to solve electrification first.

But, it is not that easy. Here is a quick quote:

Another important form of transformation is the generation of electricity. Thermal power plants generate electricity by harnessing the heat of burning fuels or nuclear reactions – during which up to half of their energy content is lost. https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix

So, we are sacrificing some loss anytime we transfer from one to others. Even from AC to DC electricity to charge batteries, and DC-AC to supply energy peak to AC grid.

We've looked at energy from a wide angle; GHG, demand, growth and finally electrification. To really understand how clean energy transformation, we need to zoom into the machina that connects it all: the electrical grid.

This invisible network is what keeps every socket alive, every light on, and every car charger running.

Electrical Grid

The electrical grid is a complicated system. It is an endless dance between overproduction and underproduction, balanced every second.

Question: How normal AC power generators store energy? Where is the buffer for instant change in power grid? Or If it stores any energy?

Wait a minute? I asked that question to myself and couldn't answer properly. Now, I learned it, and I am ready to pretend that I of course know that truth for a decade. And I am Electronics Engineer with Bachelor's Degree 😄 But, they never teach us power grid at school, actually. Or maybe I missed that week! But I felt the shame now 😦 I would actually guess it would be like that, but still I feel a bit amazed once I learned how AC power grid store energy to deal with instant peaks?

In an AC grid, the supply of electricity must match demand every second, because electrons flow and alternate at the system frequency (50 Hz or 60 Hz) and cannot easily be “stored” in transit. The main “buffer” is the rotational kinetic energy of large synchronous generators and their connected turbines — their spinning mass resists changes in speed, so when demand suddenly rises they momentarily supply extra energy by slowing slightly, and when demand falls they absorb it by speeding up slightly. That rotating mass (inertia) buys the grid a few seconds of time for other control systems (governors, fast‐acting reserves, storage) to adjust output or demand — essentially acting as an instantaneous energy storage mechanism.

If the grid managers are doing their job, you should never notice any of this. - David Roberts, Writer at Vox

How AC grid actually works

So, electricity production and price is live market. And obvious indicator is instant price of it. If it is cheap, it means authorities wants you to consume electricity instead of throwing that energy away or charging grid scale batteries.

Charging and discharging batteries is always cost! Best way is just consuming electricity when it is generated. But apparently, there is no perfect supply demand match without batteries.

Cheap energy can be so cheap that they might pay you to consume electricity, especially in windy day) you better charge your car, or use your dishwasher or oven. But to do that, you need to have either smart grid and smart home devices to constantly check that prices or preferably having a good battery at home so that you can at least charge your home while energy is cheap.

That also would smooth the energy peak moment. Just from a demographic facts like everyone is cooking between 5 and 8, for most of the countries they are activating old and dirty power supplies to supply that demand peak.

I read that, and it made sense to me. I told you here and it makes sense even now to you. But let's try to check data to approve we really have demand peaks to dirty electricity correlation:

Daily Energy Demand statistics

To see how it looks, I found data visualization site for UK. Both emission and price are both peaked around 5PM to 7PM.

Another graph from a blog post:

*Daily demand across seasons (Source: New England ISO)*

Energy demand is higher at summer for most of the developed countries. Mainly because of Air conditioning. But again, demand for all season almost peaked at 5PM to 7PM.

Here is another graph from the USA. US Energy Information Administration website.

It is not interactive here, you can follow the link to see details. But mainly same statistical truth: demand peak corresponds natural gas peak!

Another example from France:

Data is from this Friday (2025-10-24). And apparently for france, there is a high demand thought all day and another small peak at around 17. But demand is pretty low at 2 to 4AM.

Dispatchable Generation

There’s a term for energy sources that you can ramp up or shut down quickly: dispatchable generation.

It basically means: while you need to create demand to make use of solar or wind when they’re available, natural gas or coal plants can simply wait in standby and jump in whenever the grid needs them.

That flexibility of being able to “open and close” electricity supply on command is one of the biggest challenges for the renewable energy transition.

If you count nuclear as renewable (technically it’s not, but it’s definitely green in terms of emissions), then it partly solves the problem. But economically, it often doesn’t make sense to shut down old fossil plants and build new nuclear ones from scratch. Maybe we can afford it for some countries but I don't think we are going to do that 😄

Anyway, that’s the point: we need to find a way to minimize the use of those dispatchable sources and still live a stable, peaceful life powered mostly by renewables.

We’ve already invested enormous energy into building those old plants; if we could treat them as “bad-day helpers”.

Duck Curve

Oh, we have another Wikipedia term for that energy demand mismatch: Duck Curve.Very helpful summary of what I am trying to say.

Without any form of energy storage, after times of high solar generation, power companies must rapidly increase other forms of power generation around the time of sunset to compensate for the loss of solar generation, a major concern for grid operators where there is rapid growth of photovoltaics. - Wikipedia

By the way, we have a great website to see instant carbon footprint of electricity:

Interactive App | Electricity Maps

Track real-time and historical electricity data worldwide — see production mix, CO2 emissions, prices, cross-border exports, and much more.

Dashboard

So now we all understand the point. When the sun sets, people tend to turn on their appliances at the same time, and that causes an energy peak that must be supplied instantly.

We better store some energy for such peak, or use old dirty power plants only for those hours! Or we just change our culture to spend less energy

Final list of problems

So, to finalize this post let me try to list what kind of problem we mentioned here:

Endless growth vs. limited planet. Modern economies are built on ever-increasing energy demand, but the climate crisis forces us to question whether that model can continue.
Energy inequality. Developing countries still need to raise consumption to grow, while rich countries try to decouple GDP from energy use—sometimes by outsourcing emissions.
Conversion losses. From heat to motion to electricity and back, we waste a huge share of energy at every step.
Dependence on dispatchable fossil plants. Coal and gas still provide the “on-demand” flexibility renewables lack, keeping emissions high.
Timing mismatch. Solar and wind often produce energy when we don’t need it, and peak demand (5-8 PM) arrives just as the sun disappears.
Fragile grid balancing. The AC grid must match supply and demand every second, relying on spinning inertia and fast-acting reserves.
Household behavior. Our daily routines—heating, commuting, cooking, eating—create predictable peaks that force the grid to fire up its dirtiest backup plants.
Economic incentives misaligned with climate goals. Prices and policies still reward cheap consumption more than smart, flexible use.

For the next chapter, we’ll look at possible solutions to these problems from home batteries and smart grids to new ways of thinking about demand.

If you read it so far, I really thank you. I know it is not a good article, just an effort to organize my thoughts and learnings.