The UAE uses scads of energy. Oodles. Just lighting up the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, is like lighting up a small city, in much of the world.

A story today in The National notes that the country’s demand for energy is rising at 9 percent per year, which is three times the global average.

Some of that is about a rising population and the accompanying increase in housing and buildings of all sorts, especially as the UAE economy heats up.

But several other factors come into play, factors that lead to a situation where the six nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the UAE) consume as much energy as the whole of Africa — which has 20 times the population of the GCC.

To wit:

–Air conditioning. Pretty much the whole of the UAE has cooled air for more than half of the year. Only in the past two days have we gone the whole of a night without running the AC, in the Abu Dhabi apartment. And it is mid-November.  The AC has been on pretty much nonstop for seven months in many buildings in the UAE, and air-conditioning is a major power sucker.

–Subsidized electric bills and low gas prices. Bills for electricity are remarkably low. The consequences of running the AC in your house … forever? Not worth mentioning. In the apartment tower where we live, they don’t bother with billing us for AC use until the total gets up to some number worth pursuing. We might get billed every third month. Really, it’s like $10 a month to run the AC and gas is about $1.70 a gallon, so run the AC forever in the SUV, too; nobody cares about mileage because it is economically irrelevant.

—Desalination. This was not mentioned in The National story, which focused on the rise of heavy industry in the region which is, in fact, new. But desalination goes on all the time in this region; the UAE has practically zero fresh water, and 99 percent of the supply here is former seawater.

Desalination plants — and the world’s largest is in the southern edge of Dubai — consume large amounts of energy. Heating up all that seawater, to make it potable, is a difficult and expensive undertaking. Even when much of the emirate of Abu Dhabi seems to float on oil.

No one knows this better than the people who run the country, and that is why four nuclear power plants have been planned, to be built by a Korean company, with the first scheduled to come on line in 2017.

That is a particular indication of the demand for power here — a country with enormous oil deposits, and oil burns cleanly, compared to coal, is shifting to nuclear, for domestic consumption, with all the long-term risks that entails, from disposing of spent fuel to accidents (Chernobyl) and acts of God (Fukushima).

It is hard to imagine power consumption being curbed here any time soon. Air conditioning and desalination alone are enormous demands, and those are base requirements for a population of any size surviving in this part of the world.