5 ms·
The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12%
by owenversteeg 9mo ago
The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12% of the total for the EU and 7.8% for Europe.
For that, you want this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country?country=~OWID_EU27 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc.
You can see that this the gain in renewables in the EU has been mainly at the expense of coal (down >50% as a share of total energy use in 10 years), gas (down 4%), and nuclear (down 20%.) Oil use as a share of the total is up by 5%.
- eigenspace 9mo agoIt can be rather misleading to to talk about renewable energy generation versus total energy usage. Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation). Another large quantity of energy-usage is heating, and electrical heat-pumps can be around 3-5x more energy efficient at heating an enclosed space than combustion or resistive heating. So while things like heating an transportation use a very large amount of energy, conquering them with renewables actually won't require that Europe installs 10x or whatever more wind and solar, since electrification also brings significant new efficiencies. ______ If you want to compare renewables against the amount of fossil fuels being burnt, then it'd be a lot more representative if you calculate the amount of wind energy impacting a wind turbine blade, or the amount of energy in solar radiation incident on a solar panel. That's an easy way to inflate the renewable numbers by ~5x or whatever
- adrianN 9mo agoMost power plants are less than 50% efficient.
- eigenspace 9mo agoYeah, 70% is more or less a best-case scenario (unless you count systems for recovering and distributing waste heat, then it goes higher)
- pfdietz 9mo agoA gas-fired CC plant built today will have a LHV efficiency > 60%.
- adrianN 9mo agoThat is true, but I believe that most power plants are not modern combined cycle gas plants.
- owenversteeg 9mo agoI mostly agree. Certainly transportation is an obvious one. But of course there are still some losses; when you include all the losses in the system and cold weather you can easily get ~80% for EVs vs. ~30% for ICE cars. Heat pumps can be very efficient, but 5x more efficient than combustion/resistive heating (which is near 100%...) is not common in practice. 3x, sure, plenty of installations that get that or better in mild climates. That said, those are two pretty large items. If we reached 90% electrification on both it would be a pretty big win: Road transport represents ~26% of global energy use and all heating/cooling (industry, building, agriculture) represents ~50%.
- youngtaff 9mo ago> Road transport represents ~26% of global energy use Does that 26% include the energy that's involved to ship the fuel in tankers? Something like 50% of marine fuel usage is shipping fossil fuels around the world
- SECProto 9mo ago> Something like 50% of marine fuel usage is shipping fossil fuels around the world Note that marine shipping is extraordinarily fuel efficient (from a gCO2/(t*km) basis), so I doubt that it adds a lot on a per ton of fuel basis. We just ship a lot of fossil fuels. This [1] graph looks to be in the right ballpark from what i remember in school 15 years ago, i didn't verify it in depth but +- an order of magnitude better than the next best method is roughly right https://image2.slideserve.com/4166134/gco-2-t-km-of-freight-transport-modes-l.jpg https://image2.slideserve.com/4166134/gco-2-t-km-of-freight-...
- lambdaone 9mo agoEven though petroleum product shipping accounts for almost 40% of shipping, the surprising efficiency of ocean transport still means that it's not that big an energy cost; a single-digit percentage of the energy content of the shipped oil/gasoline. But even that is still worth saving - it's a few percent more benefit for electrification.
- grumbelbart 9mo agoExactly. It is in general (much) more efficient to burn natural gas in a power plant and use the electricity for heatpumps compared to simply burning gas at home for heating.
- m4rtink 9mo agoYeah, in combined cycle plants you burn the natural gas first in a gas turbine first, use the waste heat from that to boil water and run steam turbine. Then condense the steam using your district heating circuit. You can say this is 100% efficient as you make some electricity and the rest does house heating.
- eigenspace 9mo agoDefinitely not 100% efficient, but it can still hit a much higher efficiency than without the heat recovery
- nandomrumber 9mo ago100% efficient assuming a perfectly spherical combined cycle gas turbine with district heating circuit operating in a vacuum.
- m4rtink 9mo agoLet say all the loses provide heating for the power plant building itself. ;-)
- grumbelbart 9mo agoThe thing is that your home's heatpump has an efficiency of 300%-500%. So even if your power plant and power delivery only has say 50% gas-to-electricity-at-home, you are still looking at 150%-250% gas-to-heat-your-house efficiency.
- holowoodman 9mo ago> Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation). Yes, but there are also future inefficient uses of renewables. E.g. when making iron, you heat the ore (iron oxides) with coke (refined sulfurless coal). The coke will provide extra heat and act as a reduction agent, separating the oxygen atoms from the iron oxides. Now you can do the same thing with hydrogen as the reduction agent to avoid producing CO2 and to avoid using fossil fuels. However, creating renewable hydrogen is atm only 30% efficient, storing and transporting it has losses. Even with possible improvements, that hydrogen will be a very inefficient and costly use of electricity, and at least half of it will always be wasted. So in terms of total energy usage, making those kinds of industrial processes use hydrogen, we will have to at least double our electricity output. And a lot of that doubling will be wasted because of the inefficiency of electrolysis, as opposed to directly using coal or natural gas.
- Borg3 9mo agoUh, can you provide any scientific papers that H2 can be used for Iron smelting? CO2 is very stable, even at high temperatures. Its hard to strip O2 from it (except photosintesis). Now, H2 itself is very violatile gas. When burn, it creates water. Water is not stable high temperatures. It become vapor and when temperature rise it can even break bond between H2 and O. So, papers or are you hallucinating?
- nasmorn 9mo agoThey are already building such plants. So I would assume they have a plan But here is a paper - only the title is German the main part is English https://pure.unileoben.ac.at/files/1851525/AC06514880n01vt.pdf https://pure.unileoben.ac.at/files/1851525/AC06514880n01vt.p...
- jijijijij 9mo agoAre you suggesting burning H2 will create water and enough energy to split the water in H2 and oxygen again, afterwards? That would be amazing news! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steelmaking#Hydrogen_direct_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steelmaking#Hydrogen_direct_re...
- natmaka 9mo agoThere are quite good explanation published at https://ourworldindata.org/energy-definitions https://ourworldindata.org/energy-definitions and https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method
- nandomrumber 9mo ago> The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. … and 7.8% for Europe. Yes, the _!ONLY!_ thing is, this won’t move the needle at all on climate change. Wind and solar for electric is the lowest of low hanging fruit. No one has even proposed that they have maybe even possibly have perhaps thought of an idea to address transport and agriculture related emissions. Lithium ion batteries, or a solid state alternative aren’t it. Not without being some orders of magnitude more energy dense and lighter. And you still need to electrify those sectors to be able to charge the batteries.
- korhojoa 9mo agoConfident talk, but that's not at all the reality that I'm seeing. Public transport is almost completely electric powered where I live (ferries still haven't changed to electric, but it's coming.) Trucking is electrified, as in, the operators have realzed that they're cheaper to run, so they are changing over when possible. (Sidenote: with some of the heaviest loads worldwide) Very many agricultural buildings in active use either have, or are installing solar. Their energy usage is so high, that any offset to it is "free" money. Many have installed batteries also, so if there is an interruption in power delivery, there isn't an immediate need to start up a generator. Electric tractors are also something I've heard them want. Less maintenance means less time spent not being able to work. Sure, fertilizer and animal husbandry have other emissions which aren't tackled by this, but why exclude improvement just because some other area isn't affected.
- nandomrumber 9mo ago> not at all the reality that I'm seeing. You’re not looking hard enough, past the greenwash.
- Tor3 9mo agoWhat was listed by the poster you replied to are genuine real facts, so the one who should look harder is you, in this case.
- 9mo ago
- anovikov 9mo agoOverall renewables (including the "bad" ones like biogas, and the finite ones like hydro) are at around 27% of TFC in EU today (25.2% in 2024 and growing at around 1% per year). Not bad. But far from replacement. Renewables plus nuclear is now at around 70% of all energy (by final consumption) that is produced in EU though, it's just that the rest is imported.
- etiennebausson 9mo agoAnd nuclear fuel is also imported (but refined locally), so not sure it should be counted as 'local' in this case.
- anovikov 9mo agoNuclear fuel is around 2-3% of electricity cost, and there is too much worldwide supply for it to be of any concern, so it doesn't really matter where it comes from. For energy balance calculations it is accepted that nuclear energy is counted as produced where the reactor itself is.
- natmaka 9mo agoStrategically, if nuclear power experiences a resurgence, procuring uranium could become difficult because the superpowers (Russia, China, and the US) will want to reserve it for themselves, and corresponding efforts have already begun. The majority of nuclear-producing nations (Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.) will immediately comply. Wind and sun, however, cannot be confiscated or withheld by blockade or embargo.
- victorbjorklund 9mo agoThere is so much uranium in the ground (in the west too) that it doesn’t make sense to ”keep it” for yourself. Why would Russia wanna keep a supply for the next one million years instead of selling it and get money today? Same with all other countries with uranium.
- black_puppydog 9mo agoNice link, thanks! Still, the renewables (I'm not counting nuclear and biofuels, but counting hydro and "other renewables") make up 21.1% of the total energy consumption as well, up from 13.3% in 2015. That's still quite marked. Also after clicking the "settings" button to show absolute values, I was surprised to see that total energy consumption peaked in 2006 (hey, that's 20 years ago!) at ~18,900TWh, and is now at ~15,700TWh. I'd guess that demand for Oil is so inflexible mostly due to its use in transportation? If that's the case, we should see this value drop as the adoption of EVs progresses, but clearly so far they haven't made a dent. Edit: after clicking around a bit more, it seems that the EU energy use reduction might be mostly due to off-shoring energy intensive industries... ayayay. XD
- a_paddy 9mo agoDo not underestimate the impact of transitioning from incandescent to LED lighting. An average home could be consuming 1Kw for lighting alone at busy times.
- youngtaff 9mo agoOr the EU's push for more energy efficient appliances
- ZeroGravitas 9mo agoJust transitioning from coal to gas for electricity production has a big impact. The graph is adjusted to compensate for the efficiency of the power plants, but it's an average and one they need to update every so often as plants get more efficient. But we're phasing out the oldest and least efficient coal plants and replacing them with gas plants that are twice as efficient (33% vs 64%). The graph under discussion assumes 40% as discussed here: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method
- Tor3 9mo agoWhere heating is needed, and where heating is done by electricity, changing to LED lighting indoors don't make any difference whatsoever. Unless your main heating source is a heat pump. In my home there's a heat pump upstairs, but not downstairs. All the lights downstairs are now LED, but the only effect that has is monetary - LED lights are way more expensive, and contrary to claims, don't last longer either. But these days LED is the only option available when buying. Heat pumps though.. they really save a lot of electricity. Very visible on my electricity bill.