Global energy and economic development · 153 countries · 2020
Energy use per person varies by more than a thousand times across countries. I tested three explanations for that spread: how many people a country has, how big its economy is, and how much its people earn. Only one of them holds up.
Both axes are logarithmic. Circle area is proportional to the share of energy that comes from renewables. The same three countries are labeled in every scene so you can track where they move as the y-axis changes.
A few caveats. These are correlations from a single year, not causal estimates. Rich countries can afford more energy, and cheap energy helps economies grow, and this data can't separate the two directions. Renewable share is only reported for 64 of the 153 countries, and those 64 skew wealthy, so anything involving circle size comes from a biased subset. I've left it in for context, not as a result.