How Power Demand, Emissions, and China Will Shape the Global Energy System to 2030

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Unlike previous cycles, electricity demand is no longer simply following economic growth. Instead, power consumption is becoming a leading driver of economic activity. This shift signals the arrival of what analysts increasingly call the “Age of Electricity,” where power is the backbone of modern economies and decarbonization strategies.

Note:

From 1938 to 1940, Buckminster Fuller worked as a technical advisor for the editors of the renowned magazine Fortune.

He wrote:

“Between 1938 and 1940 I was on the editorial staff of Fortune magazine as its science and technology consultant, and my researchers harvested all the statistics for Fortune’s tenth-anniversary issue, “U.S.A. and the World.” In that issue I uncovered and was able to prove several new socioeconomic facts—for the first time in the history of industrial economics: (1) the economic health of the American—or any industrial-economy was no longer disclosed (as in the past) by the total tonnage of its product output, but by the amount of electrical energy generated by that activity;

(2) We were doing so much more given work with so much less pounds of materials, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per given function as to occasion ever newer, lighter, and stronger metallic alloys, chemicals, and electronics. Though at that time universally used as the number-one guide to the state of economic health of any world nation, tonnage no longer represented prosperity. The amount of energy being electrically generated and consumed became the most sensitive telltale of economic health.”

Source: Fortune Magazine. February 1940