Household energy burden has never been comparably measured across most of the world. We built the first open-code, open-data pipeline that estimates it for 129 countries and 17,028 grid cells covering 8.2 billion people. Three findings that no single prior study surfaces: a quality-of-energy gap Odum’s emergy framework exposes, an access + affordability + QoS gap that single-axis indicators miss, and a climate-justice mismatch sharper than any prior estimate.
6× variation in
grid
transformity (sej/J)
67× per-capita cumulative
CO2
climate-justice disparity
129 countries
with
cell-level microdata
8.2bn
people covered
by the atlas
Nuclear-heavy grids (France, Slovakia) deliver electricity with ~15× the emergy per joule of wind-heavy grids (Denmark, Germany). Two grids with identical per-capita kWh can carry radically different prior-emergy investment — invisible in CO2 or kWh accounting. Odum’s framework separates quality from quantity.
Global access to electricity is 91%; global access to clean cooking fuel is 74%. On top of that, quality of service varies enormously — outage frequency, voltage sag, tariff affordability. Households in low-QoS grids are functionally under-served regardless of the binary access statistic.
The 20 least-electrified countries hold 498M people (6% of humanity) and 0.13% of cumulative CO2 since 1750. The 20 largest historical emitters hold 4.8bn people and 82%. Per-capita cumulative disparity is approximately 67-fold.
Each finding on its own has been sketched in prior work, but no prior study combines all three at cell-level for 129 countries with fully open data + open code. The combination reveals patterns that single-lens studies miss:
Cell-level maps, cross-signal PCA, climate-justice scatter, country archetypes, emergy panels.
WB, Ember, OWID, EIA, WHO, FAOSTAT, UNDP, NASA GISS, WGI, and more. Every number traceable to a script + cache.
Ecological Economics, Science Policy Forum, Joule, Nature Energy scope, JSS ecosystem umbrella, JOSS Wave 1, Scientific Data descriptor.
13 R packages, all MIT-licensed. Includes
emburden::neb_func (Net Energy Return),
emburdensynth::grid_transformity (Odum emergy),
emburdensynth::run_global_pipeline.
The emergy computation inherits the country’s grid mix onto every cell (no cell-level fuel mix data exists at this scale). Cumulative CO2 is territorial-only (consumption-based would tighten rather than loosen the disparity). Physics baseline uses global-average building envelope. Full caveats in the technical report.