Tuesday, August 24, 2010

2009 US Energy use

https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2010/images/energy-flow-annotated.pdf

The latest energy generation/use chart for the US is out. Sinks and source, plus general field of use--it's a fascinating chart, and I hope it gives you a sense of where real solutions to the energy issue lie. Let's work on the efficiency issue.

Via Treehugger

2 comments:

Jennifer said...

What is "rejected energy"? Is that what's wasted due to inefficiency?

Dean W. Armstrong said...

Yeah, any energy consumed that does not end up being used--in most cases it ends up as heat. For electricity generated via thermal means, I just read coal or oil achieve a 33% efficiency, gas is 50%.

One of Amory Lovins' neat ideas is to take all the wasted heat in electricity generation and use it for purposes that need heat that would otherwise just consume more energy. Like if the power plant somewhere is wasting 400kW of heat into the air, why can't we heat our hot water or heat our buildings with that or colocate some factory that needs drying heat?

Also I found the archive of this chart through the years: https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/energy/archive.html#energy_archive