Electricity and energy consumption

Summary: Electricity is the fastest-growing type of energy used for power worldwide, and in the United States it represents the most common form of end-use energy.

Electricity is highly preferred as a form of energy because of its extraordinary versatility and its ability to be moved over very long distances. Electricity can be created with a wide variety of fuels, including the sun, wind, water, coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, and various types of biomass. It meets a broad variety of needs for energy through a wide array of energy services, including lighting, cooking, space heating and cooling, refrigeration, transportation, water pumping and irrigation, manufacturing and industrial processes, computing, consumer electronics, and telecommunications. No other type of delivered energy can meet such a wide range of needs or be distributed across such vast geographic regions.

Electric power production and electrical systems are vital infrastructures to all nations. Nonetheless, great disparities exist between countries in their ability to provide electricity to their citizens; a widespread lack of access to electricity in low-income countries is a form of “ energy poverty” and is regarded as a significant barrier to achieving the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.

Discovery and Development of Modern Electricity

Curiosities associated with static electricity have been known to humans and studied by them since ancient times. In American culture, the “ discovery” of electricity has been long associated with iconic images of Benjamin Franklin, kites, keys, and lightning. Franklin’s legendary experiment in 1752 did confirm that lightning was a form of electric current, but it was by no means the discovery of what we conventionally mean by the term electricity, which is the flow of an electric current (more specifically, the flow of charged particles).

A systematic understanding of the character and properties of electricity emerged largely during the age known as the Enlightenment and the associated Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. From 1600 to 1850, a progression of (often accidental) experimental findings and inventions provided the foundation for modern electrical science and engineering. William Gilbert, a court physician to Queen Elizabeth I, published the first scientific treatise on magnetism in 1600 and offered the Latin word electricus to explain the property of static electricity. The term electricus is derived from the Greek word for amber, a mineral that readily develops static charge when rubbed. Electricity entered into the lexicon in 1650, the same year that German inventor Otto von Guericke built the first apparatus to systematically generate static electricity.

Englishman Stephen Gray established the theory of electrical conduction in 1729, and in 1733 French scientist Charles François du Fay explained that electricity was of two types, resinous and vitreous. (Franklin later clarified and renamed these concepts as positive and negative charges.) Many other notable minds contributed to knowledge about electricity during this era, including Luigi Galvani, who discovered bioelectric currents; Hans Christian Ørsted and André-Marie Ampère, who substantially advanced knowledge about electromagnetism; and Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, who refined the theory of electrostatic charge, attraction, and repulsion.

Three sets of discoveries were essential for the emergence of modern electrical systems and electric power production. First, Italian count Alessandro Volta developed the first primitive electric battery in 1800, a device that was critical for understanding the nature of electrical circuits and for providing a more reliable electric current than static electricity generators. Second, using a battery based on Volta’s design, George Ohm elaborated the properties of voltage, current, and resistance and mathematically defined their relationship to one another. The fundamental physics of an electrical circuit, known as Ohm’s law, was published in 1827. The third breakthrough was Michael Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic inductance, the ability to create an electric current with magnetic fields. During Faraday’s lifetime (1791–1867), his groundbreaking work on electromagnetic induction led to the development of key modern technologies. These included Faraday’s invention of the dynamo, a primitive electric power generator and the precursor to modern generators; his demonstration of the conversion of electricity into mechanical energy, the foundation of modern electric motors; and his technique for electromagnetic induction itself, which quickly led to the invention of the induction coil by Father Nicholas Callan in 1836. An induction coil can raise or lower the voltage in an electric current–the basis of modern transformers, which are critical components in electric power grids.

By the mid-1800s, key principles about electricity, conductance, inductance, and circuits were known, and the core technology, the electromagnet, was in place. This foundational science and engineering would enable the practical and commercial application of electricity, one of the key drivers of what has been called the second Industrial Revolution. At the time, electricity was a radical innovation because it allowed the movement of manufactured energy over long distances for the first time; it is no coincidence that the first real social use of electricity was for the telegraph in the 1830s. (It was as a telegraph operator that Thomas Alva Edison learned the principles of electricity.)

Other early uses of electricity involved the ability to ring bells, which had immediate and valuable applications for urban fire-alarm systems. After the telegraph, it took decades for electricity to demonstrate its full potential. A distinctive feature of electrical energy is that it requires complementary technologies: There must be a technology that can create electricity (an electric current), and there must be a complementary technology that can actually receive the electric current and do something useful with it. The rapid, concomitant rise of both electric power generation equipment and socially useful electrical devices is the hallmark of the Electric Age, a period of time from roughly 1880 to 1945 in the United States and a few European countries.

The Electric Age is defined by extraordinary inventiveness with the application of electromagnetism to electric power generation systems, electrical equipment, and other devices. Paralleling these developments were innovations that used electricity, such as electric arc lights, the incandescent lightbulb, motors, household appliances, computational business machines, and a variety of medical technologies.

During this era, the role of electricity as an enabling condition for industrial invention was completely transformative. Electricity facilitated the design of machines that could not physically be built by mechanical principles alone, such as the complex computational devices that foreshadowed today’s digital computers. Electricity makes possible motors, machine tools, and other electromechanical equipment.

Widespread factory automation was achieved through electrical thermostats, servomechanisms, and other types of electromechanical controls. A materials revolution occurred as well; for example, the commercial manufacture of aluminum, the most significant metal of the twentieth century, is predicated on an abundant and inexpensive supply of electric power. Transportation systems were likewise affected and reshaped urban geographies—trolley cars and long-distance subway lines run on electrified railways.

New forms of primitive entertainment advanced to sophisticated experiences by broad audiences, as illustrated by the evolution of the hand-cranked stereoscope (largely a living-room mechanical novelty for the wealthy) to the electric motion-picture projector and film industry. The invention of the radio similarly gave rise to the commercial broadcast industry.

Electrification of Homes and Businesses

Electrification of homes and businesses in the early years of the Electric Age was motivated predominantly by access to incandescent lightbulbs, a higher-quality and safer form of lighting than oil lamps, gaslights, and electric arc lamps. However, electrification also spurred entirely new classes of industrial products, particularly household appliances and audio equipment (first the phonograph, then the radio).

Domestic electrical devices such as refrigerators, toasters, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and radios not only subtly reshaped family life but also redefined the nature of housework and women’s roles in the home. Because of its impact on households and its role in industrial mass production, the commercial exploitation of electricity is widely regarded as a main factor in the rise of the consumer economy.

Thomas Alva Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse are the technological entrepreneurs frequently given credit for pioneering the Electric Age. Their formative ideas and inventions focused on electric power generation and distribution as well as key complementary applications, particularly motors, lighting, and electric railways. Together, these three individuals laid the technological foundation for today’s large-scale electric power grid. The dominant technological paradigm of the modern electric power infrastructure was shaped more than a century ago as Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and Samuel Insull struggled to establish cost-effective commercial exploitation of electricity.

Edison and Westinghouse operated early electric companies in the United States. Edison brought the very first commercial power plant, Pearl Street Station, online in Manhattan on September 4, 1882, using reciprocating steam engines to power dynamos. Pearl Street Station delivered electric lighting to Wall Street, a clientele with whom Edison had worked previously because of his stock-ticker machine. (The New York Times was also a first customer of Pearl Street.) Private electric companies that provided lighting services quickly proliferated: low-voltage, direct current electricity (such as that generated by Pearl Street) could be distributed only within a mile. Westinghouse demonstrated the feasibility of alternating current for long-distance electricity transmission by building a hydropower plant at Niagara Falls in 1896 to service Buffalo, New York, 20 miles away.

By 1900, most major urban areas in the United States, Europe, and Japan had a mix of public, municipally owned utilities and private electric companies. The public utilities usually provided electricity for streetlights and trolley cars, while private companies electrified homes and businesses with lighting.

Insull, an entrepreneur in Chicago, quickly transformed the nascent electric utility industry in 1903. Insull deployed for the first time both steam turbines and alternating current transformers, which radically changed the economies of scale for power production. This system of electricity production and distribution quickly proved to be a natural technological monopoly. It was not possible—because of the nature of the technology and its cost—for multiple competitors to exist in the same market. Private power companies located in the same city quickly consolidated or went out of business, usually leaving only one electric power provider in the area. As a consequence, political control of electric companies was quickly instituted. Between 1907 and 1914, 45 states began regulating private electric companies as monopolies, with policies affecting rates, territories, and terms of service. Federal regulation began in 1935.

Other landmark developments ensured that the electricity infrastructure was accessible throughout the country because of its critical role in economic development and quality of life. These included the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 and the gradual interconnection of all utility power transmission and distribution lines into three large regional power grids, a process that was largely complete by the 1960s. Among the world’s wealthiest nations, historical patterns of electrification and electricity use largely followed that seen in the United States, primarily because many of these countries experienced the second Industrial Revolution at approximately the same time. In all nations, large urban areas receive electricity first, with rural areas lagging considerably behind.

At the start of the twenty-first century, access to electricity was nearly universal in industrialized nations and widespread even in many developing countries; however, some nations, mostly concentrated in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, continued to struggle with high levels of energy poverty. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that 1.2 billion people lacked access to electricity in 2010; this number fell to 775 million by the start of 2023. While this represented significant progress in the fight against energy poverty and a meaningful expansion of electricity access in some of the world's least-developed regions, some experts felt that this progress fell short of what would be required to meet the United Nations' goal of universal worldwide electricity access by 2030. To address this ongoing gap in a sustainable manner, many environmentalists, economists, and other experts pushed for greater investments in the green energy sector and direct foreign aid to developing countries.

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