American energy use
vox.com
vox.com
Carbon taxes or excise taxes on fuel are the solution. They are endorsed by most economists (often in addition to emissions trading). Taxes must be imposed on emitting greenhouse gasses or at least on purchasing fuels; in addition a cap must be placed on the total amount of emissions.
If you are libertarian and you feel like there are too many taxes already - the carbon tax can either substitute other taxes or the revenue from it can be returned to tax-payers in some form.
Vox itself recently had an article about carbon taxes in California, it includes a part where the collected revenue is then redistributed back to citizens: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/5/3/15512258...
I would be surprised if carbon tax payments offset some other taxes.
* Carbon tax forecast for X billion in revenue.
* Let's knock X billion off of income taxes (or whatever else you want).
This is what Washington State tried, although the measure was sadly opposed by "environmentalist" groups like the Sierra Club.
http://www.sierraclub.org/washington/sierra-club-position-ca...
I personally support offsetting carbon taxes against other taxes, but since it would be regressive, I'd lean towards mitigating that in whatever compensatory tax cuts were introduced.
And if the policy is regressive then you face the danger of it blowing up in your face. For example, see what happened when the rich in America seized most of the benefits of globalisation, now we have Presidents threatening to burn it all down and being popular in doing so. If you actually want carbon reduce toon to be successful you need to factor in the politics, both getting the wealthy and powerful on board and getting the average man in the street to feel that he's not being screwed (which some people will tell him he is, even if he isn't).
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/5/3/15512258...
The electricity generation waste I'm willing to take at face value, but only because I am somewhat familiar with the concepts of conversion factor loss and line loss. I find both of these assertions require digging into the footnotes to understand better. Their presentation is a little too hand wavy. I'm really at a loss to understand what the transportation waste means. Sure, you also need to propel the mass of the vehicle. Is it comparing every other vehicle to a bicycle? I don't know.
The presentation isn't "hand wavy", it's just simplified. Most of the confusion in this thread is from users who don't understand relatively simple aspects of how energy is generated and used. Which is fine, but the response to that should be to look something up or ask a question, not attack the graphic.
However, this stuff still very simplified as lighter cars use less fuel even without changing the % of waste energy generated.
Yes, but they reduce the total Joules of energy wasted, and that's the important point.
And that would be reflected in the graph at hand. I know we're all talking percentages, but the graph is actually about total quantity. If everyone were in very light cars, the transportation bar would be narrower, and the total energy going to the Waste node would be smaller.
So it's accurately reflecting any efficiencies of that kind.
Total work done by the vehicle / total energy contained the fuel.
A small combustion engine is a very inefficient converter of energy, so it's no surprise that it's only able to use 1/4 of the available energy. The rest is lose as heat (as well as minor losses such as noise and slippage).
Much of the waste is simply Carnot efficiency of thermal systems: the amount of useful energy you can extract is proportional to the (absolute) temperatures (Kelvin) of the "hot" and "cold" ends of the cycle.
For thermal electrical generation -- coal-fired plants, gas-fired turbines, oil-fired turbines or diesel generators, biomass thermal, solar thermal, or nuclear plants -- this is in the range of 30 - 45% or so. Ironically, high-temperature thermal coal achieves some of the best thermal efficiency. This doesn't mitigate its far more compelling downsides.
Direct kinetic or photovoltaic electrical generation has no thermal losses, but is subject to the efficiency constraints of the input stream: hydroelectric, wind, or solar PV.
There are additional losses in transmission (about 6%), and in electrical conversion and switching equipment ( ~<10%). The net is about a 66% energy loss in what's delivered to the electrical customer.
For transportation, you have the same Carnot efficiency limits, but given the smaller temperature differential start with a lower initial efficiency -- about 30%. There are additional losses through parasitic systems (any powered in-car features: power steering, brakes, A/C, electrical and electronics, etc.), transmission losses, tire and wind drag.
Again, all well understood and modeled, and well-behaved in large-number populations.
The Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) has done energy modelling for the United States since the 1970s, and has a set of flow diagrams (Sankey diagrams) showing flows dating to the 1950s, through the present.
If there's one thing libertarians love, it's redistributing money through the government.
Some example reading to open your mind: https://mises.org/library/externalities-argument
Argument that "it's hard" is not much of an argument at all. It does make me think that there's considerable flexibility in a "libertarian" position on externalities though.
But I do agree that the best pricing schemes involve settling on price through transaction. Take, for example, cap & trade schemes. This is a widely used mechanism to manage negative externalities.
Externalities exist, whether or not the "Austrian" school has a way to deal with them. Considering the issue, deciding that one's philosophy can't deal with them, and therefore deciding to stick one's head in the sand instead is why mises.org remains fringe. It's an irrational, religious framework.
Read Mises Human Action and you will understand.. Austrian economics is a priori (built from first principles) not a posteriori (empirically derived)
Fine it's impossible to correctly calculate externalities. I don't see the line from there to: "BigCo dumped a ton of waste in my pond, but it's unfair for the government coerce BigCo to compensate me because there's a chance the I might get more than the true value of that pond."
For things like transportation I'd much rather see a "miles traveled" tax than a carbon tax (it could even be tiered for electric vehicles). It's far more specific, and thus harder to lead to crazy far reaching taxes in tangential areas.
Why? The harm done is relative to emissions, which is exactly proportional to the volume of fuel going in. A tax on miles traveled would unfairly punish cars with great (or infinite) gas mileage. (Unless you think the relevant externality is cars on the road...)
But they're dwarfed by non-environmental factors like road wear-and-tear, and accidents, which are covered by other taxes and insurance.
The past 40 years of politics shows that this is simply not true in reality, though it is often repeated. There is significant political will to lower taxes, and taxes get lowered frequently. More frequently on the wealthy, but frequently nonetheless.
When it comes to taxing externalities and improving market function, there's often significant room to improve the market. As long as costs can be estimated within ~50% it's going to be a big win to legislate them. However, since the cost of going over is often not linear, it can be difficult to enforce in a fair way in the market without some sort of auction scheme like what goes on in cap & trade.
A miles tax is far worse than a carbon tax; it's far more of a stab in the dark. It doesn't even account for wear & tear in any way, which is dependent on an polynomial of the vehicle weight.
Large fossil fuel companies, like Exxon, are planning on an $80/ton carbon tax. There's zero reason to not phase this in along with the Paris accords. It's silly to ignore the work that those, negatively affected by the tax, have already agreed is going to happen.
Source: http://www.justfacts.com/taxes.asp (tons of footnotes there to bea.gov
I would assume that the tax rate would be based on vehicle class, but that seems too easy.
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/charts/Ene...
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/charts/Ene...
They both show 97.3 quads of primary energy use, but in 2011 the chart shows 41.7 quads going to energy services while that dropped to 30.8 in 2016. The US use of energy lost over 25% efficiency in just 5 years? While keeping primary energy use totally flat? The only way to make that work, mathematically, is if people are reducing their use of energy services and preferring inefficient ones for their remaining use.
I return to a simpler explanation: the chart methodology for identifying rejected energy and energy services has changed, so you can't compare two arbitrary charts. I wish they would keep the original charts around but also produce a time series showing each year's results with the latest methodology.
EDIT: the 2015 chart seems to be the one that introduced new methods; compare to 2014. There's a big shift in just one year.
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/charts/Ene...
But I believe the blog adds useful context (starting with the quads)
People at the lab who were aware of them were uniformly pretty proud of those main energy figures. I had multiple old hands approach me at the poster presentation who were really enamored of the design, one fellow actually said he thought it was the best figure the lab produced. Of course, I was a pretty dumb grad student and wasn't totally sure what I was doing, so mine don't have the polish of the official ones. They were fun to work on though.
[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/albums/7215763423...
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Maybe you're thinking of the global level, where agriculture is comparable to transportation and the IPCC grouping "agriculture, forestry, and other land use" (AFOLU) is greater:
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_a...
I would venture that the reason that latter figure doesn't come up much in American policy discussions is because American policies can do a lot more about American transportation emissions than American policies can do about foreign agriculture or deforestation.
Still, agriculture is a big player no matter how you cut it, and your own eating habits are a lot easier to control than overall policy or law changes (and probably even your transportation, given the strong need for cars).
Even the losses in electrical transmission don't really mean anything unless compared to an alternative, which will have its own losses, and which can't really be compared kWh but instead relative cost.
Someone can correct me if I'm off-base.
But often all else is not entirely equal, and then an analysis like this may be helpful.
For instance, if you look at the transportation sector, you don't actually need to supplant all the energy there, only the actually useful part. And batteries + an electric motor is in fact much more efficient than gasoline + an internal combustion engine.
(1) LED light vs incandecent where incandescent's rejected energy is waste heat
(2) Natural gas used to heat a house versus natural gas used to generate electricity to run an electric home heater. The direct use rejects far less heat.
This is information that can lead to policy. If you see a lot of waste in a particular path that could be substituted with a different path, policy could be used to encourage the more efficient path. For example, due to abundant hydroelectric energy, the Northwest US used to use a lot of electric heating. Once hydro no longer met demand, the government had a commercial campaign to educate consumers about how they could save money by switching to gas.
But, electric heat pumps don't generate heat but, as the name suggests, "pump" it from one place to another, so they can be more than 100% efficient, generating something like 2-3x the input energy for air source, or up to 5 for ground source pumps. Which puts electrity ahead again (especially as some of that electricty can come from low carbon sources rather than gas).
I hadn't even heard of a heat-pump until recently, which makes sense, since they seem to mostly be concentrated in warm, dry areas.
Edit: According to Wikipedia, I'm specifically thinking of Air-source heat-pumps, which have a terrible coefficient of performance below 17 degrees Fahrenheit. Geothermal is better, though I believe you still have problems with saturation in cold climates.
If you have natural gas it makes sense, economically, to use that to heat most places in the USA.
Geothermal heat pumps can definitely work in the portions of the upper midwest. I know some people in both MLK and Madison that have heat pumps.
As far as I understand it's hit and miss, though. Depends on the particular piece of property you're living on. And you may need an additional heat source for occasional use (e.g. the super cold winter a couple years back I know one of those folks were super glad they still had gas heating in addition to the heat pump).
> I hadn't even heard of a heat-pump until recently, which makes sense, since they seem to mostly be concentrated in warm, dry areas.
Ironically I'm the other way around. Didn't hear about heat pumps until moving north. Probably because heat pumps don't make as much financial sense in warmer climates where you're not blowing $100+/mo on heat?
Until recently I had no idea the air conditioner-like heat pumps existed, and it appears that they are only useful if you live in a place with a low dew point and relatively high minimum temperatures, since they can ice pretty easily and don't work well below a certain temperature.
Anyways, Most of the people I know with geothermal in Wisconsin have fairly large tracts of land, and still need to supplement with wood pellets or something similar. I'm not sure you could fit enough of the heat exchange loops in a typical yard in a densely populated area.
To be honest, the last time I did the math was probably about 10 years ago, but I recall vertical systems are really not cost effective if you have access to a city natural gas system unless you really like AC.
That being said, I'm renting right now, so I haven't kept close tabs on recent developments.
Edit: Also, I think heat pumps are installed in warmer climates because a dual-purpose AC that doesn't heat that well is cheaper than installing a separate fossil fuel based system, which would be overkill as well as much more expensive.
> unless you really like AC
Given changes in climate as well as obesity rates, more and more people will really like AC as time goes on, even in the coldest places.
Thorstein Chlupp / Riena LLC builds net-zero-energy homes in Fairbanks, AK. He has numerous very long (1-3 hour) videos describing his design methodology and process in detail. The homes are designed, from the sub-grade up, to be as efficient as possibly in a high-heating-need environment. He makes extensive use of thermal mass and insulation, as well as design features minimising heat loss, and maximising gain.
At the core of his homes is a a 5,000 gallon stratified thermal storage tank -- a repurposed fuel tank filled with water, and packed in roughly 1 meter of insulation on all sides. Sourced heat, from solar thermal panels, a wood stove, and other sources, is fed to this. It drives both space and water heat for the structure itself.
Walls have 18"+ insulation, all fittings are thermally isolated, heat exchanges are used on air and water transfers, etc. It's pretty impressive stuff.
For Wisconsin, you might not choose to apply all the concepts, but the idea of banking heat (or chill) in the summer (or winter) through some form of mass storage (ground, tank, other), might apply.
There are community thermal storage systems which have been designed and deployed in both Canada and Germany.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_stor...
He talks a lot about similar building concepts. I know he takes a lot of pride in building extremely efficient homes. I think I've listened to him talk about heat exchangers for several hours straight before.
He mentioned they can't do geothermal effectively up there because the bedrock is above the frost line. They have less than a few feet of soil in a lot of places before you get down to granite. I imagine geothermal has issues with permafrost that makes installation similarly difficult.
Thanks for the links, I'll definitely check them out.
Video search: https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=thorstein+chlupp
These two in particular detail the design logic:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AtHkvpRI6fc
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xen_VWyDezY
A fair bit of his technology comes from Germany, as does he ;-)
And there are some videos there that run less than an hour. Though I find the two listed to be well worth the time to watch -- information dense. You can skip through bits if necessary.
The petroleum industry has complete dominance over government policy to the point where we go to war. The Petrodollar and world reserve currency status is a mighty powerful incentive to stay dirty.
1. The Jevons paradox. Increased efficiency, by itself increases utilisation of a resource. If you want to reduce consumption, you need to INCREASE costs. In the context of fossil fuels, this means carbon and other taxes, generally.
2. Efficiency gains are typically overestimated and underrealised. More generally, more efficient systems tend to require tighter integration and coordination.
3. Much efficiency within the US has to do with basic infrastructure and land use. Housing, commercial, and industrial building design. Land use, more than anything else, which drives transportation patterns. Appliance design, education, and more.
4. Le Chatlier's Principle probably also applies (and the Jevons Paradox may well be a special case / instance of this). Changes to a system in one direction tend to lead to compensatory response in the opposite.
5. Many efficiency technologies or adaptations are not themselves highly lucrative, or have greater costs than the apparent economic benefits.
On that last:
Proper tyre inflation and regular tune-ups. The first ... simply has to be done regularly. Tune-ups are pricy relative to energy savings.
Replacing incandescent lights with LED (Do this!!!). Start with high-use fixtures.
Proper insulation (easy) and weatherproofing (harder) of homes and building. Increasing ceiling insulation makes a tremendous difference. Blocking and stopping drafts and other leackages is much more intensive, and is often hampered by poor initial construction and standards.
Wrapping water and HVAC pipes and conduits. Thermal loss within the structure from water and space heating/cooling is another easy win.
Understanding your home's energy-use cycles and dependencies. In cold-weather climates, thermal stratification and hot/cold zones within the structure often lead to overheating (or cooling). Increasing insulation efficiency may exacerbate this as blower fans run for shorter periods of time, and hence mix interior air less completely. Counterintuitively, having high-efficiency, low-speed fans within rooms to mix floor and ceiling air, or running central blowers for longer periods of time, even when heating or cooling aren't being applied, may significantly increase overall comfort.
The article makes the point that we could save a lot of energy by designing less wasteful systems. Does anyone know of general numbers on the practical efficiency of particular energy generation mechanisms as well as the consuming apps? It's obviously a lot less than the thermodynamic limits. David MacKay's wonderful 'Without Hot Air' [1] has some numbers but it's hard to relate them directly to the LLNL diagrams.
[1] https://www.withouthotair.com/c22/page_155.shtml, for example.
But you could take solar as an example - is it better to use up twice as much roof space/desert if the overall design is cheaper that way? Probably. Yet, all else being equal, the more efficient design is of course preferable, less stuff to install, less material usage, so technological advances tends to push for higher efficiency, I think.
On the consumer side, just look up the efficiency in what interests you. It should be easy enough to find numbers online.
If you're in the EU, most household appliances have a mandatory rating from G to A, with the least efficient appliances having a disturbing red G, while the best have a nice green A:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_energy_label
As you can see in the example in Wikipedia, the differences between the ratings are significant. When this thing started, you could buy a G fridge - I think those may have been the norm. I looked up an internet dealer right now, and the lowest rating I could find for sale is A+, with A++ being the norm. In a year or two, A+++ is probably the norm.
It has worked like the MHz wars on PC, amazing really. As long as there's competition and someone puts energy efficiency in the spotlight, things can actually change.
That seems very difficult to define and I'm afraid this "America is so inefficient" rant is some misunderstanding of what is an imperfect measure.
More or less rejected means "lost as heat before we can do something useful with it".
Computers will turn essentially all power entering them into heat. But then by that measure we can never make an efficient computer but would have to look at something like flops/W to give us actionable information.
What is a measure we can apply consistently to computers and cars and get actionable information?
What happens "past the meter" is a consumption question.
Generally.
So the rejected energy in this sankey diagram is partly just the consequence of the thermodynamic efficiency limits of the situations. Also, since there are always heat and resistance losses (the real world is not a frictionless surface), the efficiency of converting energy into work is further decreased.
All in all, we're actually pretty good at covering heat into energy. The rejected energy here is simply a consequence of the situation and thermodynamics. For other situations that don't involve heat-to-work, such as wind and photovoltaics, the Carnot cycle doesn't apply, and you can have much less rejected energy.
Until inverters are made to be more efficient, this will always be a huge bottleneck for dynamic energy input and output for the solar industry, and should be considered as apart of the losses for a solar unit.
That seems pretty unlikely, do you have any literature on that?
Inverters do sometimes become less efficient when there's less power coming out of the panels, but getting <85% efficiency out of an inverter in any common scenario would probably just mean that the install had been poorly designed.
I guess a case could be made for not capturing the thermal energy from the sun with panels and using that, but it's a strange case to make. (Probably about as strange as getting more than Carnot limits out of petroleum. Though if the waste heat is used in, say, steam pipes for distribution in a city, maybe not so strange...)
Ideally, that waste heat would be put to some use...that's called co-generation [2]
[1] http://blog.schneider-electric.com/energy-management-energy-...
So simply running hotter is not a realistic solution to get above 30 or so percent, not at current technology levels. That's where strange staged and cogeneration schemes are applied to boost efficiency.
Low grade process heat is surprisingly useless in practice, unfortunately. Also economics and politics smack up against engineering ideals, where massive vertical integration would result in higher efficiency but short of nationalizing all industry or allowing massive monopolies its hard to integrate a coal generating plant with a steel mill heat treatment plant and a sardine canning plant and a greenhouse all under the same roof. Maybe with infinite scaling nano-technology all industrial plants could do all things to really boost efficiency.
For electricity generation, yeah. What it is that stops us from using it for residential heating? Eg, space heating and for hot water. Is it just the proximity to big power plants that makes it unfeasible?
It's been done though.
We can guess what rejected energy meant when this was drawn (presumably, Carnot efficiency was taken into account, since that's the most probable explanation for the very low efficiency of transportation), but it's hard to interpret without knowing for sure. (I assume the LLNL has a document somewhere that breaks this all down, but it would be nice to have more details in the article.)
All energy other than petroleum, natural gas, and biofuels, is 3%.
https://www.eia.gov/Energyexplained/?page=us_energy_transpor...
I guess it's just so efficient relative to the other sources.
GDP is notorious for this.
I still wish that US would promote better standard when it comes to thermal insulation, water preservation, etc. I recently visited Las Vegas, and the whole city could be case study (from freezing AC'ed hotels/casinos/cars, to law being watered during the day).
They import petrol for cars at the very least.
It is true that this is a fraction of total energy use, but this lays the groundwork for reaching clean energy for transportation, specially if Iceland follows on Norway's trend for electric vehicle usage (29% market share for 2016, Iceland's on 4.6%).
Using energy is overall a good thing. It improves our quality of life. Energy use is not something we want to get to zero - otherwise we might as well be living in the stone age.
For similar worldwide usage patterns, see the IEA's (International Energy Associaton) Sankey chart: https://www.iea.org/sankey/
David Roberts makes a large point about decreasing efficiency of US energy use since the 1970s. This may be somewhat misleading as the chart is based on overall statistics (fuel imports and production, power-plant generation statistics) and engineering models of processes, rather than direct measurements. As models change, estimates of wasted energy may also increase.
I'd pay more attention to the input side, and overall usage, where the story becomes more interesting. In particular, renewable sources such as wind and solar are now being broken out individually, a major change from earlier years (though this has been happening in recent years as I recall). If you look at overall energy usage trends (not immediately apparent from the Sankey diagrams), what's most telling particularly since the 1970s is how the current usage of energy is declining relative to earlier projections. This is mostly good news.
If you're interested in making sense of the numbers, or converting them to different forms, I highly recommend the GNU units utility. This is a units-aware console calculator, with some very useful and underappreciated capabilities, including the ability to conver between, say BTUs and the equivalent solar panel area you'd need to provide the same energy:
You have: 100 quadrillion btu / (1 kW/meter^2 * 0.2 * .3 * 365 days)
You want: km^2 *
55759.336
/ 1.7934216e-05
This is available on Linux, OSX (via homebrew), and Windows (via Cygwin). Note that OSX includes the BSD Units utility, which does not have the additional definitions provided by the GNU utility.
You can convert quads to TJ, or millions of barrels of oil, or tonnes of coal. You can compute the size of a tank or scuttle, in cubic kilometers, required to deliver this energy. You can estimate how many solar panels, or windmills, or hydro plants, would be necessary to provide the same energy. You can estimate cropland and biofuel equivalents (this ... doesn't look promising given present energy use).
More mash-notes on GNU Units here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1x9u0f/gnu_uni...