Every few years, some part of the British state publishes a forecast of how much electricity British households and businesses will use in the years to come. And every single time, they get it woefully wrong, predicting big increases in demand that never seem to arrive. Instead of learning from past mistakes and revising down future estimates, more recent forecasts see it surging.
The chart below tracks nine separate forecasts of future electricity use in Britain. All of the forecasts come from the government directly, with the exception of the National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios (FES) which are explicitly required by government regulation.1
It is hard to emphasise just how wrong past forecasts were. Every forecast of the last twenty years predicted big rises in the demand for electricity. In reality, demand didn’t just fall. On a per capita basis, it fell faster in Britain than in any other developed country. Between 2000 and 2019 electricity demand per capita fell by 22%. Only Yemen, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, Tajikistan and Syria saw electricity demand drop by more.
It might be tempting for greens to argue that falling electricity use isn’t a problem. In the last 25 years, Brits have adopted LED lightbulbs, energy-efficient white goods, and insulation at pace. There’s something to this, electricity use is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
The thing that really matters for climate change is not how much electricity we are using but whether we are electrifying the ‘dirty’ parts of our economy. Are we adopting EVs, heat pumps, and converting blast furnaces into electric arc furnaces?
So, is the share of primary energy demand met by electricity growing or falling?
Since 2000, it has grown slightly (+2.4%) but in the last decade is essentially flat (+1.1%). Currently, 17.5% of our primary energy consumption is electric. We are far behind Sweden and Norway (50%), France (32%), and China (23%).
To reach Net Zero by 2050, Britain will need to reach the same electricity share as Sweden and Norway. If the share grows at the rate it has since 2000 that will take over 300 years. At current rates, Britain won’t even reach Chinese levels of electrification until 2086. And if anything, our modest growth in electricity share has been flattered by deindustrialisation. Since 2000, industrial gas demand has fallen by 54%.