Data driven: Soaking up solar

Australia was the world’s largest consumer of solar energy per capita in 2019, according to Visual Capitalist.

(George Barker is a journalism/CS major at Northeastern University. He’s worked for the Harvard Business Review and as campus and sports editor for The Huntington News.)

BOSTON (Callaway Climate Insights) — Australia was the world’s largest consumer of solar energy per capita in 2019, consuming 1,764kWh per capita, while the second largest consumer per capita, Japan, had the highest share of its energy mix come from solar energy in the same year, according to a report from Visual Capitalist. In 2019, 3.59% of Japan’s energy came from solar, while they consumed 1,469kWh per capita. 

Meanwhile, the U.S., Belgium and UAE all stood out as other top 10 consumers of solar energy when looking at the gross numbers per capita that at the same time only had roughly 1% of their total energy come from solar. The U.S. consumed 815kWh of solar per capita, much higher than both its neighbors as Canada consumed 286kWh and Mexico consumed 241kWh per capita. 

Two of the bottom 10 countries for solar energy consumption per capita carry great potential for solar technology, if they want to use it. Venezuela and Iraq used 1 and 5 kWH per capita in 2019, respectively, despite a wealth of sunshine hours to draw from, according to a separate Visual Capitalist report. Egypt, another one of the sunnier nations on Earth, used 91 kWH of solar energy per capita.