Correlating Electricity Consumption and Public Illumination from Low Earth Orbit

Artificial lighting is indispensable in the modern world. This work investigates the correlation between publicly available measurements of light emitted from the Earth’s surface from LEO with the publicly available energy consumption per country globally with the goal to assess the electrical energy use. To this end, we define a radiometric power conversion coefficient $\alpha$ as a ratio of the light intensity emitted to space to the total energy consumption. Both of these quantities and related parameters are obtained from publicly available sources.