Long-term trends of electric efficiencies in electricity generation in developing countries

Naoko Maruyama and Matthew J. Eckelman

Energy Policy, 2009, vol. 37, issue 5, 1678-1686

Abstract: This analysis provides time-series data on electric efficiencies for 138 countries and regions, covering all fossil fuels for the period 1971-2005, with an emphasis on non-Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Fossil fuel consumption for electricity generation in non-OECD countries now exceeds that in the OECD. The historical performance of the top five non-OECD consumers of each fossil fuel for which reliable data are available is presented and discussed. For each fuel, the countries that lead the world in efficiency are used for benchmarks; bringing the rest of the world up to these standards would result in energy savings of 26EJ (equivalent to 5% of global energy consumption) and CO2 emissions reduction of 2.1Pg (equivalent to 8% of global CO2 emissions). Coal showed the largest potential margin of improvement for both energy and CO2, with possible savings equivalent to 3% of current global energy consumption and 5% of global CO2 emissions. The gap in electric efficiency between OECD and non-OECD countries over the past 35 years has widened for coal-fired generation, stayed relatively constant for natural gas, but has shrunk for petroleum. The results show the very gradual nature of overall efficiency improvements and the significant differences among regions and countries.

Keywords: Electric; efficiency; Power; generation; Carbon; dioxide; emissions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301-4215(08)00743-X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:37:y:2009:i:5:p:1678-1686

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().