Which countries get the most energy from hydropower?
Which country generates the most electricity from hydropower? It probably comes as no surprise that China — famous for the 21,000-megawatt Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest-capacity hydropower plant — is the world leader in hydroelectricity.
Asia is also the region where hydropower is growing most rapidly, according to the latest available figures, as reported in BP’s 2011 Statistical Review of World Energy.
Globally, electricity from hydropower grew by 5.3 percent between 2009 and 2010, with new developments in the Asia-Pacific region accounting for the bulk of that growth: a full 72.1 percent.
In terms getting the greatest amount of its total energy from hydroelectricity, though, no country can hold a candle to Norway, which in 2010 got nearly 64 percent of all of its energy — that includes oil-based energy for transport — from hydroelectricity.
The world’s top consumers of domestically produced hydroelectricity in 2010 were:
- China – 163.1 million tonnes of oil-equivalent (mtoe) (6.7 percent of its total energy consumption)
- Brazil – 89.6 mtoe (35.3 percent)
- Canada – 82.9 mtoe (26.2 percent)
- US – 58.8 mtoe (2.6 percent)
- Russia – 38.1 mtoe (5.5 percent)
- Norway – 26.7 mtoe (63.9 percent)
- India – 25.2 mtoe (4.8 percent)
- Japan – 19.3 mtoe (3.8 percent)
- Venezuela – 17.4 mtoe (21.7 percent)
- Sweden – 15.1 mtoe (29.8 percent)
