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The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spe

The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc. Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil. Important to note that the image is for 2018. So, things have shifted a bit in favor of wind and solar since then. There's an updated chart for this: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2022-09/Energy_2021_United-States.pdf https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2022-09/E... A few nice insights from the two versions of this graph: - Wind and solar grew a lot. - Nuclear declined. - Gas grew a little. - Coal declined a lot. Oil usage is up. - Overall energy production went down, usable energy went down, rejected energy actually went up. So a little bit of extra oil and gas usage resulted in more rejected energy for less usable energy. - fossil fuel usage is dominant for transport. But most of that is rejected energy. Going electric is going to make a massive difference as we'll be able to do more with less. - Industrial usage of energy is a bit more efficient. A reason for that is a lot of it is heating. So heat is the intended output rather than wasted. - Renewables are a small portion of the inputs but a large part of the usable output because of the efficiencies. And it grew a lot in just 3 years. - We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output. If you replace something with 40% efficiency with something that is 80% efficient, you can do with 2x less. Great visualization. Worth studying if you want to understand the energy market at a glance. Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven. Coal is tanking hard for the same reason. Yes coal is dirty and nuclear isn't. But they are both too expensive.

melling 3y ago
“Coal declined a lot” Yes, in the United States (4% of global population), coal usage declined. Unfortunately, globally coal usage is at all time highs. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-coal-consumption-reach-all-time-high-this-year-iea-2022-12-16/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-coal-cons... I’d say it’s ok that we overlooked that but we were warned 45 years ago about global coal usage being a large part of the problem. https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  4% of global population but 28% of global CO2 emissions. You forgot to mention that.
  - melling 3y ago
    It wasn’t pertinent to my point. I was merely pointing out that coal is a huge problem. Also, the United States is 15% of global emissions, not 28%. https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      Fair enough, the figures I found were probably older. My point is the USA should fix its own problem before lecturing others. Other countries are far more advanced in renewables, time to catch up.
PaulKeeble 3y ago
Another aspect is the power it costs to make the power. Oil is a huge industry with enormous transport fuel usage. Nowadays about a 6th of the energy goes into collection. The more we electrify the more that will be saved too coming off the total power we need. Solar, Wind, Hydro and Nuclear are all vastly better in this aspect on production costs and little ongoing transport.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Good point. Oil tankers by themselves put out a measurable percentage of CO2. Also oil refining is an energy intensive industry. Ironically, a lot of that has been cleaned up. It's literally cheaper for oil refineries to be using wind and solar than it is for them to burn their own product. That's why Texas has so much renewable power.
  - joecool1029 3y ago
    > It's literally cheaper for oil refineries to be using wind and solar than it is for them to burn their own product. Until it's winter, the ground is frozen, and they have no reserves to burn. Then there's a panic to get the same nonrenewables they would normally flare off when the weather is sunny and breezy. > That's why Texas has so much renewable power. It has tons of underdeveloped land in a region with good wind and favorable sunlight. That's it. Texas, like Germany's lignite (shit coal) renaissance, is a terrible example of good energy policy. Keep in mind Texas is also on its own grid and struggles to pay people to burn the excess energy they can't use since they also can't easily send it outside their grid and have almost no means to store the excess.
    - danhor 3y ago
      Wasn't the issue with Texas that renewables were behaving as expected (unfortunately not producing a lot of electricity), but fossil fuel power sources were failing unexpectedly due to the freezes? Thus the issue not being renwables. I'm also surprised at the mention of a coal renaissance in germany. While coal isn't reduced as much as it should, all the data I found pointed to a continual downwards trend over the last years.
zokier 3y ago
> The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc. > Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil. To uninitiated like me the chart was really confusing. In many sectors doesn't almost all energy get ultimately lost in some way? Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat, or in transportation unless you move goods up a mountain all the energy is just lost?
- Trombone12 3y ago
  > Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat I mean, not all of the IT sector is ad-tech you know; for example, many would argue that the systems durably recording how much money you own provide a useful service.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  "Lost" means spent towards nobody's useful purpose. Nobody used the output in any way. In transportation, you used your car to get from point A to point B. You don't care about the heat or noise or whatever that you generated. That energy was "lost." If somebody harvested that same energy directly from your vehicle for some purpose, like making fried eggs on your engine block, then the portion used to fry your egg would no longer be "lost"
  - zokier 3y ago
    That just seems either an impossible, or just useless measurement. I guess for industries like aluminum smelting you can say the product captures significant part of the energy put into the process, but most human activities are not like that. For example machining/casting that raw aluminum stock into some intricate product, all the energy ends up as waste because from physics point of view that intricate object doesn't contain any more energy than the raw stock material. If that is how its considered, then I struggle to understand how the rejected energy is not closer to 100%
polotics 3y ago
This chart distresses me: solar at 0.9 is only about a third of petroleum at 36. It is making it look like new renewable (ie non-hyrdo) are a lot more sizeable than they really are. From Lawrence Livermore this is hard to swallow. If the boxes sizes are on a weird logarithmic scale, then this should be explicit in the legend.
- aurelwu 3y ago
  the lines are what shows the energy amount, the boxes have a minimal size for readability and are acting as the legend of the chart.
  - polotics 3y ago
    ok. what got me is that the amount is written on the box, not on the lines...
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  That's the 2018 one by 2021, it hit 1.5. And you forget this is the entire US energy economy; not just electricity. Also, only about a third of that petroleum input is useful (worse in transport, about a quarter). So, that would be about a 12. Add wind, hydro, and nuclear to the mix and it's basically a 50-50 split in terms of useful output of oil vs. renewables. Of course most of that goes into electricity generation. But luckily there's a major transition from ice to evs under way. So, that will eat into petroleum usage quickly. If you look at the useful energy component, the transition to renewables is a lot further than many people think. Everybody keeps comparing the raw produced energy. The only thing that matters is the useful part of that.
- bostonwalker 3y ago
  You are eagerly reading an agenda into what is probably just an artifact of the plotting software intended to make the plot easier to read. Hanlon’s razor applies here.
HPsquared 3y ago
That chart overemphasizes waste heat. 1 MJ of heat at 50°C is a lot less valuable than 1 MJ of electricity. They are not interchangable. The 1 MJ of electricity could pump much more than 1 MJ of low-grade heat, and it would take a lot of low-grade heat to generate 1 MJ of electrical energy. The parameter of interest is exergy. That is, usable energy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exergy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exergy
- baybal2 3y ago
  And important note that relatively modern coal and gas powerplants are more thermally efficient than nuclear. Nuclear is ran in between 250C-350C, which is rather inefficient, and requires very big turbines.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - SigmundA 3y ago
    Nuclear does not emit carbon when used, the waste heat means very little, emissions are what matters when discussing efficiency. Plutonium 239 is also 83,610,000 MJ/kg vs coal at 35 MJ/kg so the difference in thermal efficiency is nearly meaningless given how much specific energy density advantage nuclear has.
    - HPsquared 3y ago
      That's why nuclear power has so much potential. We throw away >99% of it, we're barely scratching the surface.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      The energy mass density is hugely relevant for spacecraft, not that important for most power stations. (Although an old piece of anti-nuclear rhetoric that annoys me was asking if you'd prefer a bucket of coal or bucket of nuclear waste under your bed, and one half of my annoyance was indeed the relative energy densities…)
    - 3y ago
_n_b_ 3y ago
> Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. In the US, absolute nuclear generation has been relatively stagnant over the last 10 years as plant shutdowns have been compensated by uprating other plants[1]. About 2.2 GW are coming online via the Vogtle 3 & 4 units, more updates are coming, and the Palisades unit may restart… so I think you’ll see that number creep up a bit. Existing nuclear is economical to run today and I expect basically every operating unit will try to get a further life extension to 80 years. Worldwide, we’re in a nuclear boom as plants are being built in Europe, North Africa, S America, and Asia, and Japan is finally shifting back to a pro-nuclear stance and getting reactors back online. (I wish fewer of those new plants were VVERs, though.) This is all before we see any major work starting on SMRs or advanced reactors—-some of those will certainly get built too. [1] https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generating-statistics https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generati...
- tomrod 3y ago
  That's great news!
- Andrex 3y ago
  I suppose we're going to see the nuclear debate play out as an A/B test with the US vs. the countries mentioned. Should be some interesting data eventually.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Well according to the two graphgs for 2018 and 2019, nuclear declined a bit in the US. Not surprising because there were some plant closures and not a whole lot of plant openings. And nothing is on track to be added any time soon. Maybe one or two plants. New nuclear is a bit like an oil tanker (pun intended, sorry): just very slow to ramp up new capacity. This boom you are talking about is so far not adding up to a lot of capacity being delivered. We're talking a few gw here and there. Solar and wind are being deployed by the tens of gw per year. Same with battery. I believe we'll see some nuclear plants being approved for the next decade. And maybe these modular reactors start delivering on their promises. I still think they are expensive. But why not? Unless something happens on the cost front, that will remain a minority of useful output.
vmladenov 3y ago
> We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output. This was Tesla’s main claim at their recent energy presentation. Page 4 of the doc[1] shows our waste heat to useful work is roughly 2 to 1 [1] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
bscphil 3y ago
> Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven. This does not appear to be correct. The 2018 chart shows a total energy generation of 101.2 quads. The 2021 chart shows only 97.3 quads, a reduction. The nuclear fraction of total energy generation in 2018 was 0.0834; in 2021 this became 0.0836, a slight increase in its proportion of US energy generation! Moreover, it's astonishing that in 2021 the US while operating only 55 nuclear power plants generated more energy with those plants than all the energy from solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal combined. Given the sheer number of solar and wind farms I see almost everywhere I go these days, it's really not great that they generate such a small portion of our energy needs. My understanding is that this situation will just get worse as we try to scale up wind and solar, as well, since it's much more difficult to supply base load with unpredictable power sources.

melling 3y ago

“Coal declined a lot” Yes, in the United States (4% of global population), coal usage declined. Unfortunately, globally coal usage is at all time highs. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-coal-consumption-reach-all-time-high-this-year-iea-2022-12-16/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-coal-cons... I’d say it’s ok that we overlooked that but we were warned 45 years ago about global coal usage being a large part of the problem. https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI

olddustytrail 3y ago
4% of global population but 28% of global CO2 emissions. You forgot to mention that.
- melling 3y ago
  It wasn’t pertinent to my point. I was merely pointing out that coal is a huge problem. Also, the United States is 15% of global emissions, not 28%. https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    Fair enough, the figures I found were probably older. My point is the USA should fix its own problem before lecturing others. Other countries are far more advanced in renewables, time to catch up.

PaulKeeble 3y ago

Another aspect is the power it costs to make the power. Oil is a huge industry with enormous transport fuel usage. Nowadays about a 6th of the energy goes into collection. The more we electrify the more that will be saved too coming off the total power we need. Solar, Wind, Hydro and Nuclear are all vastly better in this aspect on production costs and little ongoing transport.

jillesvangurp 3y ago
Good point. Oil tankers by themselves put out a measurable percentage of CO2. Also oil refining is an energy intensive industry. Ironically, a lot of that has been cleaned up. It's literally cheaper for oil refineries to be using wind and solar than it is for them to burn their own product. That's why Texas has so much renewable power.
- joecool1029 3y ago
  > It's literally cheaper for oil refineries to be using wind and solar than it is for them to burn their own product. Until it's winter, the ground is frozen, and they have no reserves to burn. Then there's a panic to get the same nonrenewables they would normally flare off when the weather is sunny and breezy. > That's why Texas has so much renewable power. It has tons of underdeveloped land in a region with good wind and favorable sunlight. That's it. Texas, like Germany's lignite (shit coal) renaissance, is a terrible example of good energy policy. Keep in mind Texas is also on its own grid and struggles to pay people to burn the excess energy they can't use since they also can't easily send it outside their grid and have almost no means to store the excess.
  - danhor 3y ago
    Wasn't the issue with Texas that renewables were behaving as expected (unfortunately not producing a lot of electricity), but fossil fuel power sources were failing unexpectedly due to the freezes? Thus the issue not being renwables. I'm also surprised at the mention of a coal renaissance in germany. While coal isn't reduced as much as it should, all the data I found pointed to a continual downwards trend over the last years.

zokier 3y ago

> The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc. > Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil. To uninitiated like me the chart was really confusing. In many sectors doesn't almost all energy get ultimately lost in some way? Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat, or in transportation unless you move goods up a mountain all the energy is just lost?

Trombone12 3y ago
> Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat I mean, not all of the IT sector is ad-tech you know; for example, many would argue that the systems durably recording how much money you own provide a useful service.
IggleSniggle 3y ago
"Lost" means spent towards nobody's useful purpose. Nobody used the output in any way. In transportation, you used your car to get from point A to point B. You don't care about the heat or noise or whatever that you generated. That energy was "lost." If somebody harvested that same energy directly from your vehicle for some purpose, like making fried eggs on your engine block, then the portion used to fry your egg would no longer be "lost"
- zokier 3y ago
  That just seems either an impossible, or just useless measurement. I guess for industries like aluminum smelting you can say the product captures significant part of the energy put into the process, but most human activities are not like that. For example machining/casting that raw aluminum stock into some intricate product, all the energy ends up as waste because from physics point of view that intricate object doesn't contain any more energy than the raw stock material. If that is how its considered, then I struggle to understand how the rejected energy is not closer to 100%

polotics 3y ago

This chart distresses me: solar at 0.9 is only about a third of petroleum at 36. It is making it look like new renewable (ie non-hyrdo) are a lot more sizeable than they really are. From Lawrence Livermore this is hard to swallow. If the boxes sizes are on a weird logarithmic scale, then this should be explicit in the legend.

aurelwu 3y ago
the lines are what shows the energy amount, the boxes have a minimal size for readability and are acting as the legend of the chart.
- polotics 3y ago
  ok. what got me is that the amount is written on the box, not on the lines...
jillesvangurp 3y ago
That's the 2018 one by 2021, it hit 1.5. And you forget this is the entire US energy economy; not just electricity. Also, only about a third of that petroleum input is useful (worse in transport, about a quarter). So, that would be about a 12. Add wind, hydro, and nuclear to the mix and it's basically a 50-50 split in terms of useful output of oil vs. renewables. Of course most of that goes into electricity generation. But luckily there's a major transition from ice to evs under way. So, that will eat into petroleum usage quickly. If you look at the useful energy component, the transition to renewables is a lot further than many people think. Everybody keeps comparing the raw produced energy. The only thing that matters is the useful part of that.
bostonwalker 3y ago
You are eagerly reading an agenda into what is probably just an artifact of the plotting software intended to make the plot easier to read. Hanlon’s razor applies here.

HPsquared 3y ago

That chart overemphasizes waste heat. 1 MJ of heat at 50°C is a lot less valuable than 1 MJ of electricity. They are not interchangable. The 1 MJ of electricity could pump much more than 1 MJ of low-grade heat, and it would take a lot of low-grade heat to generate 1 MJ of electrical energy. The parameter of interest is exergy. That is, usable energy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exergy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exergy

baybal2 3y ago
And important note that relatively modern coal and gas powerplants are more thermally efficient than nuclear. Nuclear is ran in between 250C-350C, which is rather inefficient, and requires very big turbines.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- SigmundA 3y ago
  Nuclear does not emit carbon when used, the waste heat means very little, emissions are what matters when discussing efficiency. Plutonium 239 is also 83,610,000 MJ/kg vs coal at 35 MJ/kg so the difference in thermal efficiency is nearly meaningless given how much specific energy density advantage nuclear has.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    That's why nuclear power has so much potential. We throw away >99% of it, we're barely scratching the surface.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    The energy mass density is hugely relevant for spacecraft, not that important for most power stations. (Although an old piece of anti-nuclear rhetoric that annoys me was asking if you'd prefer a bucket of coal or bucket of nuclear waste under your bed, and one half of my annoyance was indeed the relative energy densities…)
  - 3y ago

_n_b_ 3y ago

> Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. In the US, absolute nuclear generation has been relatively stagnant over the last 10 years as plant shutdowns have been compensated by uprating other plants[1]. About 2.2 GW are coming online via the Vogtle 3 & 4 units, more updates are coming, and the Palisades unit may restart… so I think you’ll see that number creep up a bit. Existing nuclear is economical to run today and I expect basically every operating unit will try to get a further life extension to 80 years. Worldwide, we’re in a nuclear boom as plants are being built in Europe, North Africa, S America, and Asia, and Japan is finally shifting back to a pro-nuclear stance and getting reactors back online. (I wish fewer of those new plants were VVERs, though.) This is all before we see any major work starting on SMRs or advanced reactors—-some of those will certainly get built too. [1] https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generating-statistics https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generati...

tomrod 3y ago
That's great news!
Andrex 3y ago
I suppose we're going to see the nuclear debate play out as an A/B test with the US vs. the countries mentioned. Should be some interesting data eventually.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Well according to the two graphgs for 2018 and 2019, nuclear declined a bit in the US. Not surprising because there were some plant closures and not a whole lot of plant openings. And nothing is on track to be added any time soon. Maybe one or two plants. New nuclear is a bit like an oil tanker (pun intended, sorry): just very slow to ramp up new capacity. This boom you are talking about is so far not adding up to a lot of capacity being delivered. We're talking a few gw here and there. Solar and wind are being deployed by the tens of gw per year. Same with battery. I believe we'll see some nuclear plants being approved for the next decade. And maybe these modular reactors start delivering on their promises. I still think they are expensive. But why not? Unless something happens on the cost front, that will remain a minority of useful output.

vmladenov 3y ago

> We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output. This was Tesla’s main claim at their recent energy presentation. Page 4 of the doc[1] shows our waste heat to useful work is roughly 2 to 1 [1] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf

bscphil 3y ago

> Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven. This does not appear to be correct. The 2018 chart shows a total energy generation of 101.2 quads. The 2021 chart shows only 97.3 quads, a reduction. The nuclear fraction of total energy generation in 2018 was 0.0834; in 2021 this became 0.0836, a slight increase in its proportion of US energy generation! Moreover, it's astonishing that in 2021 the US while operating only 55 nuclear power plants generated more energy with those plants than all the energy from solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal combined. Given the sheer number of solar and wind farms I see almost everywhere I go these days, it's really not great that they generate such a small portion of our energy needs. My understanding is that this situation will just get worse as we try to scale up wind and solar, as well, since it's much more difficult to supply base load with unpredictable power sources.