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Since 2000, access to electricity has increased dramatically across the globe, jumping from 75% of the global population to 90% by 2020. According to official counts, some 7 billion people now benefit from access to modern energy sources, leaving 733 million without access to electricity.

Yet, despite these achievements, a substantial portion of the world’s population continues to live in energy poverty, lacking access to the minimal levels of energy necessary to make a meaningful difference in their daily lives.

What is Energy Poverty?

Energy poverty is a binding constraint on human development and well-being. Energy poverty reflects a lack of adequate, reliable, and affordable energy for lighting, cooking, heating, and other daily activities necessary for welfare and economic development. Energy poverty also increases the digital divide.

Energy poverty can also be exacerbated by infrastructural decay and service disruptions. It is inextricably linked to economic deprivation and social inequity and can have broad societal impacts, contributing to poor health and low education outcomes.

Without adequate levels of reliable and affordable energy, the energy poor live precariously, foregoing many of the benefits associated with modern energy access, despite official tallies that may count them among those with access to electricity. At the same time, increasing energy supply to the world’s poor represents a formidable economic and political challenge, further exacerbated by the need to reduce energy-related emissions.

Who Lives in Energy Poverty?

Although the share of the global population living in energy poverty has decreased over time, the rate of reduction has been outpaced by population growth, and more people live in energy poverty now than in 2013.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, average levels of electricity consumption have decreased: from 2010 to 2019, electricity access rates rose by 40%, but overall energy supply increased only 25%. This pattern is explained in part by the addition of many very low energy consumers over the last decade. In 2017, Power Africa initiative reported 10.6 million new connections in Africa, but 8.3 million of these had received only a single solar lantern.

Global inequality in energy consumption also remains high. In 2014, citizens in Sub-Saharan Africa consumed only 6.3% of the electricity used by the average OECD resident (487 vs. 7749 kWh), even lower than the 7.3% rate from a decade prior.

New Energy Poverty Estimates

Drawing upon an extensive time series of satellite imagery spanning almost 3,000 nights from 2013 to 2020, Lost in the dark: A survey of energy poverty from space uses computational methods to generate new indicators of electricity poverty across 115 countries around the globe and over time at the level of individual human settlements.

The classification relies upon nightly comparisons of light output detected over individual settlements against a model prediction based on observations of luminosity levels over similar but unpopulated locations. Compared with earlier assessments using annual composites of nighttime imagery, analysis of daily data enables increased sensitivity and statistical detection of anthropogenic light output at dimmer levels than previously possible.

By linking the classification results to population data, it generates new estimates of those living “in the dark”—in areas so consistently dim at night that they are statistically indistinguishable from the background light levels in similar unpopulated areas.

Settlement-level data indicate that 1.18 billion people live in electricity poverty across the developing world, residing in areas without light signatures consistent with electricity availability or usage. This total is 60% higher than the official global estimate of 733 million lacking electricity access, indicating that far more work is needed to address energy justice and equity gaps.

Most of the variation in energy poverty rates is explained by within-country differences in population density, remoteness, and land terrain characteristics. However, many neighborhoods and villages lie near areas where electrical networks are already established, indicating that there are opportunities to reduce energy poverty without substantial new infrastructure investments.

An edited synopsis of Lost in the dark: A survey of energy poverty from space by Brian Min, Zachary P. O’Keeffe, Babatunde Abidoye, Kwawu Mensan Gaba, Trevor Monroe, Benjamin P. Stewart, Kimberly Baugh, Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño