California Uses More Gasoline and Diesel than China | Hacker News Reader

California Uses More Gasoline and Diesel than China

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10 pointsMikeCapone9 comments

Article would be more helpful if it actually mentioned how much gasoline China was using per year. According to this article:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/03/chinas_gasoline.html

the answer is about 20 billion gallons, and estimated to rise to about 25 billion by 2010. If California does indeed use more than China then it's both not by much and not for long.

Also, why is this on HN?

OK. I checked the gasoline numbers and they are right. That said,I think China will pass California soon. Of course, that still means that fuel usage in California is profligate in a 'world class' sense.

I also checked CAISO 2006 energy usage statistics for California against CIA world fact book numbers for China. California uses more energy in general than the entire nation of China. I am ashamed to say that I have to confess to being surprised by this. What exactly is it that causes that level of usage? Does anyone have any ideas? I don't know enough about what the energy is being used for to know if usage can be safely reduced in California. Can someone more learned in this area help me out?

(My speculations:)

I doubt it's really any one thing, unless you count California being really wealthy as the one thing.

I think air conditioning is fairly normal in California? It isn't in most of the world.

High motor vehicle usage.

Lots of energy-using technology used in agriculture.

Manufacturing: stuff is actually still made in California.

Don't forget all of that energy used to keep that intarwebs thing running.... While California uses a lot of energy it also produces a ton of stuff. California's economy would make it the sixth largest economy in the world if it was its own country (11th by PPP) and according to wikipedia it has one of the lowest per-capita energy consumption rates in the US.

"But what's really bad about that is that when you look at efficiency numbers only about 20% of the energy contained in those gallons of fossil fuels are actually doing useful work. About 80% of their energy is simply wasted as heat. That has to change."

Uh, I'm not a Mechanical Engineer, but isn't that a pretty typical ratio? Obviously higher-efficiency tech should be a priority, but in an article whose purpose is apparently to compare China and California, this makes it sound like California is using particularly wasteful technologies.

Yep, 20% efficiency is pretty normal in an internal combustion engine.

Burning the same fuel in a power plant, on the other hand, you can get 80-90% efficiency.

I wish that I remember which law of thermodynamics makes 80% "unlikely".

The second (it's always the second). And you're right, I was wrong, the maximum efficiency of a power plant is more like 50%.

Perhaps I was thinking of the efficiency of the turbines rather than the whole process.

i think that is a bold faced lie

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