Consumption 101

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Department of Energy

Consumption 101 or how much more energy did the US consume in 2019 vs 2020? Seems quite a bit according to Lawrence Livermore Labs and the Department of Energy. 

To whit.

Every year, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Department of Energy produce Sankey flow diagrams showing where energy in the U.S. comes from and where it's going. Every year, Treehugger has a look at these to see what shocking news we can discern from it. Here's the 2020 version: (seen above):

The single most important number here is the total estimated energy consumption of 92.9 quads. A quad is a quadrillion BTUs (1015) and is equivalent to the energy in 8,007,000,000 gallons of gasoline–it's big. In 2019 the total consumption was 100.2 quads, so the reduction in energy consumption was pretty much exactly what we have to do every year between now and 2030, a pandemic's worth of energy savings every year. That sounds somewhere between daunting and impossible, but if you study the chart you can get a lot of ideas about where our priorities should be.

Here is the 2019 chart (seen below) for comparison, since it is probably a more realistic look at a normal year. The first thing that grabs attention every year is how much of this energy consumption is "rejected energy." That's what is wasted as heat going up the chimney or out the exhaust pipe; they assume 65% efficiency in electricity generation and only 20% in transpotation.

Most of that orange electricity is going into residential and commercial buildings, and these days, that's mostly cooling. So reducing demand by making buildings more efficient can reduce the demand side, but as Saul Griffith has pointed out, there is no rejected energy from solar, hydro, and wind power, there is no chimney. That means you need a lot fewer quads; eliminating the rejected energy from electricity production alone reduces overall energy consumption by a quarter.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Department of Energy

Consumption 101 indeed ...