Energy Consumption

Even though some countries have improved their energy intensity, demand for energy is growing across many other countries in the world. If this increased demand is not offset by improvements in energy efficiency elsewhere, then our global energy consumption will continue to grow year-on-year. Growing energy consumption makes the challenge of transitioning our energy systems away from fossil fuels towards low-carbon sources of energy more difficult: new low-carbon energy has to meet this additional demand and try to displace existing fossil fuels in the energy mix.

Climate change and environmental degradation are an existential threat to Europe and the world. In this regard, the EU is increasing its climate ambition and aims at becoming the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Therefore, the European Green Deal aims at transforming the EU into a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy, ensuring:

• no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050
• economic growth decoupled from resource use
• no person and no place left behind

Furthermore, to meet the 2030 climate target, energy efficiency needs to be prioritised. To step up its efforts, the Commission put forward in July 2021 a proposal for a recast directive on energy efficiency. The recast proposal raises the level of ambition of the EU energy efficiency target and makes it binding by requiring EU countries to collectively ensure an additional reduction of energy consumption of 9% by 2030 compared to the 2020 reference scenario projections.

Key figures

Energy intensity can be considered as an approximation of the energy efficiency of a country’s economy and shows the amount of energy needed to produce a unit of GDP. As we saw earlier, there is a general correlation between GDP and energy consumption. Nevertheless, there are various reasons for observed improvements in energy intensity in the EU: 

1. a general shift from industry towards a service-based economy in Europe;
2. a shift within industry to less energy-intensive activities and production methods;
3. the closure of inefficient power plants, and a move to more energy-efficient appliances. 

The following map illustrates energy intensity using GDP purchasing power standards (PPS), which are more suited for comparison across countries in a specific year.



What is interesting is that a number of economically more developed countries have managed to decouple economic growth from energy use: GDP has increased while energy use has stayed the same, or even declined.

Case: Sweden
One example of this is Sweden, which is shown in the following chart. The chart shows its percentage change in GDP and energy use per capita from 1995. We see that its GDP has increased substantially. While its energy use has barely changed at all. But it’s not just Sweden. A number of rich countries have managed to achieve this. The UK, Germany, Denmark and Switzerland are some other examples of where energy use has remained flat or even declined.



As seen in the chart above, it would be wrong to assume that economically more developed countries have only achieved this by moving their manufacturing operations overseas – which would simply mean that other countries are consuming this energy on their behalf. Consumption-based energy use – which adjusts for the energy used to produce the goods we import and export – has also plateaued or fallen in many countries. We see this clearly in the chart for Sweden.

Energy intensity related to GDP
The next figure shows energy intensity using chain-linked GDP values, which are better suited for comparison of historic trends in each country. Compared with a decade ago, all EU countries achieved improvements in terms of energy intensity, while in the last five years (2015-2020) only Malta saw a rise in energy intensity.