Electrification of the economy

⚡ The electrification of the economy

Decarbonising is not just about generating electricity from renewables: we also need to use electricity where gas, diesel or petrol are burned today, in electric cars, heat pumps or industrial processes. How far have we come?

Electricity in final energy consumption: Spain 24.8 EU 23.4France 26.5Portugal 26.4Germany 22.8Italy 22.7 Norway 52.2Sweden 33.4 % of final energy consumption · 2024 · Eurostat (balances energéticos, nrg_bal_c) All countries →

How much of the energy used is electricity?

Share of electricity in each sector's final energy consumption (energy use, excluding feedstocks). Across the economy as a whole, electrification has been practically stuck at around a quarter for a decade: households are making progress, but transport, which uses more energy than any other sector, still runs almost entirely on oil products. "Comercio y servicios públicos" (commercial and public services) includes offices, shops, hospitals, schools and government buildings: Eurostat does not separate them.

Industry, branch by branch

The branches that need very high-temperature heat (cement, ceramics, glass, chemicals) are the hardest to electrify and still depend on gas; the steel industry is already largely electric because in Spain most steel is made in electric arc furnaces from scrap.

Transport: little electricity, many passengers

Transport is the least electrified sector: only 1.2% of the energy it uses is electricity. That may seem low for a country with metros in seven cities, commuter rail and one of the largest high-speed networks in the world, but the figure measures energy, not trips, and electric trains are so efficient that they use very little for the work they do.

Final energy consumption of transport within Spain (Eurostat). "Rail" includes passenger and freight trains, metro and tram. "Air, water and other" covers domestic flights and shipping and oil and gas pipelines; international flights and shipping are not included in this figure. Pipeline pumps are electric: hence the small blue part of that bar.

Why it weighs so little: the efficiency of electric trains

The figures make it clear. Rail carries 8.8% of inland passenger-km and 3.9% of tonne-km with only 1.1% of transport energy, even though that energy also includes metro and tram, which are not in the passenger-km. 87% of rail energy is already electricity. There are two reasons. The first is the motor: an electric one turns almost all the energy it receives into motion, while a petrol or diesel engine loses most of it as heat. The second is the steel wheel on the rail, which has far less friction than a tyre on asphalt, and a train carries hundreds of people at once. That is why moving passengers and freight from road to rail cuts energy use far more than it raises electricity use.

The flip side also holds: the electrification of transport has stalled because 88% of its energy is used on the roads, where electric cars are still a very small share of the fleet and lorries have barely started. In freight, Spain is far behind Europe: almost everything goes by lorry.

Rail in inland passenger transport: Spain 8.8 EU 8.9France 11.6Portugal 4.6Germany 10.6Italy 7 % of passenger-km by car, bus and train (excl. metro and tram) · 2024 · Eurostat (tran_hv_psmod) All countries →

Passengers: split of passenger-km between car, bus and train. Freight: split of tonne-km between road, rail and inland waterways (Spain has no inland waterway freight). Eurostat does not include metro or tram in the passenger split because there are no harmonised data on the distances their passengers travel, nor does it include air.

Metro does count in trips

Eurostat's passenger-km leave out the metro, but INE counts how many trips are made on each mode of public transport. In 2025 the metro carried 1,458 million trips, more than all trains combined (696 million), and 37 out of every 100 public transport trips were on rails.

INE Passenger Transport Statistics: trips (not kilometres) by metro, bus, train, air and sea within Spain, divided by population. A metro trip is much shorter than a high-speed one, so these figures cannot be added to the passenger-km above. Trams do not have their own line in this statistic. "On rails" is not always electric: some regional lines still run on diesel.

How homes are heated

In energy terms, home heating is split almost equally between biomass (firewood and pellets, especially in rural areas), natural gas, and heating oil or butane; electricity and the heat captured from the air by heat pumps together account for around 15 %. A heat pump makes use of free energy from the air: for every kWh of electricity it delivers 3 or 4 kWh of heat, and Eurostat counts that part as "ambient heat".

The vast majority are reversible air-to-air units, in other words split air-conditioning units that also provide heating; Eurostat counts them as heat pumps even though many are used mainly in summer. Air-to-water heat pumps (the kind that replace a boiler and heat radiators, underfloor heating and hot water) are still a small share.

Homes by heating fuel, by province

In Spain, out of every 100 homes with heating 34 have electric heating, 40 natural gas, 13 heating oil or oil products and 12 biomass or other fuels. In the south and in the Canary Islands, with mild winters, electric radiators and air conditioning predominate; in the northern interior, with long, cold winters, natural gas and heating oil; and in the coldest rural areas (Ourense, Lugo, Soria, Cuenca) and in Jaén, where a lot of olive pits are burned, biomass. INE's 2021 Survey of Essential Characteristics of the Population and Housing (sample-based): it counts homes, not energy, and only offers four answers. "Biomass and other" is INE's "Other" answer, which in practice is mostly firewood, pellets and olive pits, but also includes coal and solar. Heat pumps cannot be separated by province: the survey counts them under "Electricity" together with radiators and air conditioning, and the heat pump figure above (Eurostat) only exists for Spain as a whole.

Sources and notes

• Eurostat – Complete energy balances (nrg_bal_c): final energy consumption by sector, industrial branch and fuel, 1990-latest year. The comparison with other countries uses the same table and the same definition (electricity as a share of final energy consumption, energy use) and only covers European countries; Norway and Sweden appear as a reference (dashed border) as they are the most electrified economies in Europe.
• Eurostat – Modal split of passenger transport (tran_hv_psmod) and of freight transport (tran_hv_frmod): % of passenger-km by car, bus and train and of tonne-km by road, rail and inland waterways. They do not include metro, tram or air.
• INE – Passenger Transport Statistics, table 20239: monthly trips by metro, city and intercity bus, train, air and sea. It counts trips, not kilometres.
• Eurostat – Energy consumption in households by use (nrg_d_hhq): space heating, water heating, cooking, cooling and lighting by fuel, since 2010 (compiled in Spain by IDAE).
• Eurostat – Heat pumps (nrg_inf_hptc): thermal capacity by technology.
• INE – ECEPOV 2021, table 56784: main residences with heating by type of fuel and province.
• There are no open official statistics on the heating systems of public buildings: the regional energy performance certificate registers do not record the fuel.

Data updated 7 minutes ago