HP Innovation Journal Issue 12: Summer 2019 | Page 57

HIGHER AND HIGHER
Rising Income and Global Energy Demands
NATE HURST
Chief Sustainability and Social Impact Officer, HP
KEVIN GOREY
Director of Strategy, Office of the CTO, HP
Around the globe, energy enables longer,
healthier, and more comfortable lives.
Throughout history, the availability of energy has led to
better living conditions and driven economic growth—
which has funded greater energy generation capacity.
With energy came productivity improvements spurred by
a virtuous cycle of growth and economic surpluses, which
in turn enabled greater access to energy. Around the globe,
energy enables longer, healthier, and more comfortable
lives. Energy is so central to the industrial and information
revolutions that “we could argue that much of what we call
modernity is fundamentally electrical in nature or depen-
dent on the electrical grid,” as author and physicist Phillip
F. Schewe observed. 1
Energy today is a tale of two worlds. In the devel-
oped nations, energy consumption decoupled
from gross domestic product growth starting
in the late 1990s: energy demand no longer rose
in direct proportion to growth. The shift to
services and the move of energetic manufactur-
ing footprints to emerging economies resulted
in economic surpluses which developed nations
could apply to increasing energy efficiency. In
emerging economies, by contrast, governments
are focused on meeting their citizens’ energy
demands quickly and at the lowest economic
cost. Electricity to serve the growing middle-class
population in developing nations is generated by
many of the same environmentally unsustainable
techniques as those used by developing countries
in the 19th and 20th centuries—only now at a
much greater scale and rate.
EMERGING MARKETS ARE FOCUSED
ON ENERGY GROWTH TO MEET
DEMAND RATHER THAN
EFFICIENCY & SUSTAINABILITY
Gross Domestic Product & Electricity Use
Growth Rates From 2011–2015
Percentage per year (5-year average)
Gross Domestic Product
Electricity Use (ENERGY)
10%
8%
6%
4%
2%
0%
-2%
United
States
United
Kingdom
Japan
China
India
Egypt
Brazil
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