Southeast Asia is using more electricity than ever. As factories expand, cities grow and more households install air conditioners and appliances, electricity is becoming an increasingly important part of everyday life across the region.
But which Southeast Asian countries actually demand the most electricity?
Using 2024 data from Ember’s Yearly Electricity Data, here are the eight countries with the highest annual electricity demand in Southeast Asia.
The figures measure electricity demand in terawatt-hours (TWh). One TWh equals 1,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh), 1 million megawatt-hours (MWh), or 1 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh).
1. Indonesia: 372.5 TWh
Indonesia had by far the highest electricity demand in Southeast Asia in 2024.
That is not particularly surprising given its population of more than 280 million. Indonesia is also undergoing rapid industrial development, including energy intensive mineral processing.
Fun fact: Indonesia's nickel smelting industry is the world's largest, consumed around 100 TWh of electricity in 2023 alone, equivalent to 80% of the country's entire household electricity use.
Remarkably, 97% of that power comes from captive coal plants built by the industry itself, operating completely outside the national grid run by Indonesia's state-owned electricity company.
2. Viet Nam: 314.2 TWh
Viet Nam has transformed into one of Southeast Asia's major manufacturing hubs, attracting massive investment in electronics and machinery. That industrial growth comes with a heavy electricity price tag.
Fun fact: Samsung's Thai Nguyen factory alone produces more than half of Samsung's global smartphone output.
Power demand from factories like this has gotten so intense that Vietnamese officials once asked Foxconn (an Apple supplier) to voluntarily cut power use by 30% at its northern plants to avoid a repeat of past blackouts.
3. Thailand: 249.7 TWh
Manufacturing, commercial activity, tourism, and a hot climate all drive Thailand's electricity use, air conditioning is a particularly big factor.
Fun fact: Thailand's peak electricity demand hit a record 36.7 GW (Gigawatt) during an extreme heatwave. Interestingly, the peak is increasingly shifting to nighttime, as heavy AC use after dark combines with a growing wave of electric vehicles charging overnight.
4. Malaysia: 210 TWh
Malaysia's demand reflects a mix of manufacturing, commercial activity, and a booming semiconductor sector, plus a fast emerging data centers.
Fun fact: Malaysia's data center electricity use is projected to jump 8x, from 8.5 TWh in 2024 to 68 TWh by 2030.
That's roughly equal to adding all of Singapore's national electricity consumption onto Malaysia's grid. Penang, dubbed the "Silicon Valley of the East," pulled in $7 billion from Intel alone.
5. Philippines: 124.1 TWh
A large population and expanding cities support the Philippines' demand, alongside a distinctly 24 hour economic engine.
Fun fact: The Philippines' massive BPO/call center industry runs 24/7 across rotating shifts to serve clients in every global time zone.
Meaning office buildings and data infrastructure here rarely power down, a commercial electricity pattern that's unusually constant compared to its neighbors.
6. Singapore: 59.6 TWh
Singapore's demand is much smaller in absolute terms, but notable given its population of only around six million, its role as a digital and financial hub explains the intensity.
Fun fact: Despite its tiny size, data centers alone gobble up 7% of Singapore's entire national electricity consumption, a share projected to climb to 12% by 2030 as AI and cloud computing demand keeps surging.
7. Myanmar: 21.9 TWh
Myanmar's relatively low demand reflects lower industrialization and per-capita electricity consumption compared to the region's more developed economies.
Demand barely changed from 2023, increasing by only about 1%.
Fun fact: Since the 2021 military coup, Myanmar's electricity generation has actually shrunk , dropping by roughly a third as of late 2024.
Current demand sits around 5,5 GW (Gigawatt) per day, but the country can only generate about 2,8 GW, leaving cities like Yangon, Mandalay, and Naypyidaw with rolling blackouts of 5 to 20 hours daily.
It's a rare case where demand growth is being suppressed not by economics, but by an inability to keep the lights on at all.
8. Cambodia: 20.0 TWh
Cambodia's demand remains far below the region's largest economies, though it has grown considerably as the country urbanizes.
Indonesia alone demanded more than 18 times as much electricity as Cambodia in 2024.
Fun fact: Cambodia's massive garment industry, a pillar of its economy, still runs mostly on burning wood.
About 55% of the energy used by textile factories is thermal (mostly wood-fired boilers), versus only 45% electricity.
As global fashion brands push suppliers toward 100% renewable electricity by 2030, Cambodia's garment sector faces pressure to fully electrify or risk losing orders to competitors like Vietnam and Bangladesh.
Southeast Asia's Electricity Demand Is Still Rising
Indonesia, Viet Nam, Thailand and Malaysia together accounted for more than 1,100 TWh of demand in 2024.
That is 1.1 trillion KWh of electricity in a single year. Put another way, those four countries were consuming an average of roughly 125 gigawatts of electricity every hour of the year, an amount comparable to running more than 80 million 1.5 kilowatt air conditioners continuously.
This enormous demand is still rising.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) says Southeast Asia's electricity demand is growing faster than its overall energy use, driven largely by expanding industries, buildings and rapidly rising demand for air conditioning.
Under the IEA's Stated Policies Scenario, regional electricity demand is projected to rise from more than 1,300 TWh to above 2,000 TWh by 2035. Cooling alone is expected to account for almost one third of the region's growth in electricity use
That means Southeast Asia will need to add hundreds of TWh of electricity demand within just over a decade, putting increasing pressure on power plants, grids and plans for new renewable energy.
