The first households were supplied with electricity in the 1880s (from wikipedia). I think by around 1950 most urban households in the US had electricity. Rural households got there a few years later? The situation in Western Europe was similar? How electrified was Germany before and after world war II? Essentially I'm looking for charts showing the proportion of households with electric power over time for various regions in the world and my googling didn't provide anything useful beyond the wikipedia article.
4 Answers
In Europe the situation, for most countries, was different.
Gas and Electricity development was something that was developed on a local level.
Berlin, Germany
For street lighting, Electricity replaced Gas rather swiftly after 1884.
1895 steetcars were electrified and after 1902 the underground system being build also used electricity.
For households, starting around 1890, gas was primarily used for ovens as a replacement for coal or wood. Even in the 1930's, electric ovens were still unpopular.
| Year | Households with electricity in % |
|---|---|
| 1910 | 3.5% |
| 1914 | 5% |
| 1925 | 25% |
| 1929 | 50% |
Until the 1930's, households used electricity primarily for lighting.
In 1928 only 3,5% used it for cooking appliances, 0.5% for washing machines and 0.2% for refrigerators.
Sources:
answered Apr 29, 2021 at 11:54
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Gas ovens are even now pretty common in Germany. In the UK, they are apparently even common in high-rise appartement blocks, but in Germany they seem to be confined to smaller houses. Gas ovens have a number of advantages over simple electrical stoves, e.g. more power and easier to regulate output. So IMHO mentioning gas here is a bit meaningless.– JanCommented Apr 29, 2021 at 13:04
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1Is your table for % households that use electricity for cooking (in that case it is contradicted by numbers given in text below) or for % households that use electricity at all (in that case the preceding sentence gives the impression the table is about cooking)– JanCommented Apr 29, 2021 at 13:07
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And might be worth mentioning that coal/wood was also quite common for cooking.– JanCommented Apr 29, 2021 at 13:22
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1@C Monsour: It's more that gas stoves are far more responsive when you want temperature changes. Electric stoves are slow to heat up and cool down. See the Cooking site for details.– jamesqfCommented Apr 29, 2021 at 16:07
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1@EikePierstorff Most peaple don't make that distinction, they use whaever the GASAG (founded 1843) sends through the pipes. In western Berlin the switch between Stadtgas (Rauchgas) and Erdgas started in 1985 and was compleated in 1991. Any needed replacement oven/heaters were done during that period. Wenn neues Gas durch alte Rohre strömt - taz.de Commented Apr 29, 2021 at 20:48
Just a data point, but according to this German wp article, only 11 percent of US farms had electricity in 1934, while the share of farms with electricity in Germany and France was around 90 percent at the same time.
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Electrification of farms is very different from electrification of urban houses. Commented Jan 7 at 12:49
I just found a nice graph for this question for the US in this linked question. The answer by user njuffa quotes this website by the Federal Reserve Bank which has the following graph:
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Electrification of farms is a lot different from electrification of households. Farms are much harder to electrify than urban houses. Commented Jan 7 at 12:48
Tracking SDG7: the energy progress report, which is a joint project of the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), the World Bank, and the World Health Organization (WHO), has data on their website dating back to 2001 in their Trends page. They also have country specific information, but I think it only shows the most recent report for that.
You can directly download the data or you can use the Trends page itself to generate some nice maps.
In addition, the World Bank has some data on its page that goes back a little further, but not by much for many countries
