Why this session matters to us
This was the longest of the three SDG 7 side events at this HLPF, and for most of its two hours it was a procession: a president of ECOSOC, a dozen executive secretaries and ambassadors, agency heads, each with a set-piece statement that SDG 7 is off track, that the transition must be equitable and resilient, and that partnerships are indispensable. Little of that is news. What earns the session a page is the one thing it actually produced: a number, or rather a whole scoreboard of them.
The convener, GEIDCO, is a Beijing-based nonprofit founded in 2016 by the State Grid Corporation of China to promote worldwide grid interconnection. At this event it released the second edition of its own Global Electricity Development Index, launched a training “academy,” and renewed a cooperation agreement with UN ESCAP. For a project about how the UN counts, that is the story: the concrete measurement instrument on the table was not a UN statistic. It was built outside the UN system and offered to it.
The one number nobody in the room could agree on
Before any new index, look at the old one. The single most-cited figure at an SDG 7 event is the number of people without electricity, and over the course of the afternoon it drifted. ECOSOC’s president opened with “600 [to] 655 million.” IRENA’s director-general said 655 million. When GEIDCO presented its index, the figure on the slide was 730 million. Three numbers, one gap, one room.
The UN’s own reference number is neither of the round ones. The Tracking SDG 7 report released weeks earlier put it at 666 million for 2023, with electricity access at about 92 percent (UN Energy summary). The point is not that anyone was lying; it is that the headline metric for this goal is loose enough that principals reach for whatever recent figure is at hand, and a 130-million-person spread passes without comment. That is the terrain a new index enters, and it is worth remembering before treating any single score as precise.
A new scoreboard, and who is holding it
GEIDCO first published its Global Electricity Development Index at the 2024 HLPF; the 2026 edition covers 100 countries across six continents, said to account for 97 percent of global electricity demand, scored on 25 indicators grouped into four dimensions: security and reliability, accessibility and affordability, clean and low-carbon development, and “future ready.” European and Nordic countries lead; Africa sits well below the average; the presenter put roughly 40 points between the top and bottom of the table. The framing was explicit.
Its sharpest illustration was an access gap, not a ranking: a person in Uganda uses about 120 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year; a person in Iceland, roughly 52,000. That 400-fold spread is the kind of thing an index is genuinely good for, making an abstraction legible. The harder questions are the ones an index cannot answer about itself. The underlying data and method were shown as a QR code, not a published methodology anyone in the room could interrogate; the scores are GEIDCO’s, drawing on official data but assembled outside the UN statistical system that produces Tracking SDG 7.
The index did not arrive alone. GEIDCO used the event to launch a GEI Academy, a training platform aimed at developing countries and described as a contribution to “global energy governance,” and to renew its cooperation agreement with UN ESCAP, first signed in 2016. Taken together, an index, an academy and a standing MOU are the components of a parallel measurement-and-capacity apparatus, presented at UN Headquarters, with UN agencies as co-hosts. Whether that apparatus complements the UN’s own numbers or quietly competes with them is the open question the session skipped over.
The measurement points worth keeping
Buried in the panel were two arguments about what to measure that were sharper than anything in the speeches. The first came from a past president of IEEE, on why “reliable” is the wrong target for a grid absorbing renewables and AI-scale demand.
His practical example: data centres should be measured and planned as flexible load, expected to shift operations when the grid is constrained, rather than as fixed demand a utility must always meet. It is a measurement argument dressed as an engineering one, plan against flexibility, not just uptime.
The second came from the IEC’s special envoy for the SDGs, on the least glamorous form of counting: conformity assessment. Citing the World Bank’s framing of standards as “the hidden foundations of prosperity,” he argued that verified compliance, not new technology, is what unlocks finance for electrification.
And on where the money actually goes, the Secretary-General’s climate adviser supplied the figure the equity language usually lacks.
That distribution, not the absence of a scoreboard, is the constraint. IRENA’s director-general noted the world added a record 692 gigawatts of renewable capacity in 2025, more than 500 of it solar, with over 90 percent of new utility-scale renewables now cheaper than the cheapest fossil alternative. The technology and the economics are not the bottleneck. The capital routing is.
Our read
An event about a goal everyone agrees is failing produced, as its one durable output, a new way to keep score, and could not name a decision that any score, old or new, has yet changed. That echoes the lesson from this Forum’s Beyond GDP session: the UN has repeatedly built technically respectable indices, from the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index onward, that were adopted and then bound no one, because nothing obliged a lender or a ministry to use them. A Global Electricity Development Index built by a state-linked body outside the UN’s statistical machinery starts a rung below even that: it has to earn standing before it can fail to bind.
So the thing to watch is not the rankings. It is whether GEDI’s numbers, or its academy’s training, ever enter a real process, a country’s planning, a development bank’s appraisal, a UN review, or whether the index sits beside Tracking SDG 7 as a well-produced parallel scoreboard that mostly signals who is doing the counting. On the evidence of this session, the counters cannot yet agree on how many people lack electricity to within 130 million. A second scoreboard does not fix that; it just adds a column.
Why it matters for the SDGs
This lands first on SDG 7, whose thematic review anchored this HLPF, and on SDG 17, the means of implementation and, specifically, the question of who produces the official data a goal is judged by. When a member state’s grid champion offers a global index as a “public good,” that is an SDG 17 governance question as much as an energy one. The grid-and-industry thread also touches SDG 9. But the operative tension is measurement authority: an off-track goal attracts new scoreboards, and every additional index raises the same test the UN’s own metrics keep failing, whether better counting ever changes what gets financed.
Watch & read
- Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report 2025, the UN custodian agencies’ official reference (666 million without electricity), and the UN Energy summary of its findings.
- The other two SDG 7 side events in this batch: Unlocking capital for clean energy (where the finance-routing problem is the whole subject) and the Decade of Sustainable Energy plan of action.
- The HLPF’s SDG 7 thematic review, the main-meeting session this side event fed off · HLPF 2026 programme.
- Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. Figures are as speakers and agencies stated them in the room and were not independently verified; where those numbers diverged, the official Tracking SDG 7 figure is given in the text.