28 June 2024

U.S. Energy Information Administration lies with statistics

Jan van Evert, editor Nuclear Monitor

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently published an article titled “China continues rapid growth of nuclear power capacity”. It seems the authors must have read the classic book “How to lie with statistics” by Darell Huff. He wrote his bestseller in 1954 (!)  and it is still very much of present interest, and still for sale in many languages. The article shows the following bar graph:

Note the word ‘annual’. This is the first lie because in the second line below the graph  the authors write: “ a total net capacity of 53.2 GW as of April 2024”. So, the installed capacity in 2023 was 53.2 – 52.1  = only 1.1 GW.  In other words: ‘annual’ should be replaced by ‘total’. If we do the same calculation for the other years in the graph, it is easy to see that the ‘rapid growth’ from the title of the article only occurred between 2014 and 2018, and has declined a lot after that year.

The second paragraph continues with another lie and an interesting figure: “Despite rapid capacity growth in 2022, nuclear power made up only about 5% of China’s cumulative power generation that year.” So, nuclear power plays only a minor role in Chinese electricity production. According to the article the coal-fired capacity increased by 19.5 GW in China in 2022. Now that is rapid growth.