[owenversteeg]

>I have the opposite reaction to your historical energy figures - energy consumption is clearly not as important to technological progress as we imagine. If there's only a 4x difference between the Founding Fathers and B29s carrying nukes, why should there be orders of magnitude between today and [insert scifi]?

That's an interesting perspective, thank you.

As far as country breakdowns, a decent start is (as usual) Our World in Data. And indeed, as you expected, the increase in energy use is mainly from Asia. I think things are a bit more complex, though; most of China's energy use is in manufacturing. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

To your question, why do we need energy too cheap to meter? Well... because there are a lot of sci-fi scenarios that would need it. Any of (high speed travel / flying cars / space travel) at a large scale would use an unimaginable amount of energy. Plenty of ideas to protect the environment - true recycling, cleaning the oceans, truly cleaning wastewater from all the pollutants we put in it, et cetera all require far cheaper electricity. And the thing is that in most future-planning scenarios, if you need cheaper X, just wait. Most things get much cheaper over time! Not energy! If we want cheaper energy, we need to do something serious towards it, such as fusion - at least, I'm not aware of any realistic proposals to generate energy too-cheap-to-meter aside from fusion.