Our Energy Inputs and Outputs

Here’s a great article with an extremely meaningful graphic, analyzing each of our sources of energy in terms of where and how it’s used and how much of it is wasted along the way.

Fossil fuels, of course, are inherently inefficient, since it’s impossible not to waste significant amounts of the energy in each unit of coal, natural gas and oil in the process of combustion. The worst among these processes is the internal combustion engine (ICE), which typically delivers only about 20% of each BTU of energy in the fuel tank as kinetic energy to the vehicle.  Coal-fired power plants aren’t much better, where about two-thirds of the energy is lost to heating the environment, as demonstrated in the enormous cooling towers visible from miles away.

The vast inefficiency of ICE-powered vehicles points the way towards electric transportation, where the charge/discharge process is around 80% efficient.  This means that we can power the world’s vehicles with a relatively small increase in our electrical load, which can be delivered with renewables and nuclear.

Of course, as we’ve noted so often, the challenge isn’t so much technological as it is political.  Fossil fuels made the 19th and 20th Centuries what they were in terms of human progress.  Lots of people got extremely rich by delivering energy to a civilization desperately in need of it.

That’s fine.  But now all that wealth and power wants to keep itself in place in the 21st Century, a time in which fossil fuels have become the wrong tool for the job, and they’re inflicting great damage onto our health and ruining our planet.

But can human society stand up to these moneyed interests?  We’ll see.