On the website, Our World in Data, there is a page by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser titled “Renewable Energy.” On this page is a visual timeline titled “Share of electricity production from renewables, 2020,” which shows how the proportion of each country’s electricity that comes from renewable energy sources has changed since 1985. The visual shows that since 1985, the overall percentage of electricity generated from renewable energy has increased, and globally is around 25% today.
There were many aspects about the visual that I found both interesting and surprising. Particularly, one thing I found interesting was that in the United states, until 2010, the percent of electricity from renewables hovered over around ten percent, but then suddenly saw what appeared to be exponential growth that continued to the present day. I found it surprising that this growth in electricity from renewables continued through the years of the Trump administration, because his rhetoric heavily involved the return of factories and the use of fossil fuels, which led me to expect there to be a decrease in the percentage. In addition, one other interesting fact from the visual was that a large number of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa had a high percentage of their electricity come from renewable energy, but several of those countries such as Tanzania and Congo saw a massive decrease in this percentage over time.
Because energy is a complex phenomnon, there is no single factor that determines changes in a country’s use of electricity from renewables. However, the very high percentage of electricity from renewable sources seen in many Sub-Saharan African countries can likely be explained by the fact that they are mostly developing countries. Because they don’t have adequate resource and economic security, they were never able to fully industrialize and develop a fossil fuel economy, resulting in renewable energy being one of the only viable sources of electricity for them. This quintessentially shows Amartya Sen’s idea about how development requires the satisfaction of people’s basic socioeconomic needs.
The visual timeline, “Share of electricity production from renewables, 2020,” shows that overall, there has been an increase in the use of electricity from renewable sources. However, because of complexity and heterogeneity, this pattern can not be applied to every country individually. Deeper and more specialized investigation is needed in order to figure out the underlying causes.