Energy Flow in the United States – 94.6 quads in 2009

The bulk of the energy rejected to the atmosphere is attributable to power generation, whether electric power or motive power. In both cases, thermodynamics plays a significant role; so does the acidic nature of condensation in the exhaust of the processes, which limits the minimum exhaust gas temperature in systems using hydrocarbon fuels.
Natural gas combined-cycle turbine (CCT) power generation systems are substantially more efficient than coal and nuclear generation because of the heat recovery steam generation cycle which bottoms the gas turbine generator. However, even they are only about 55% efficient, based on the higher heating value (HHV) of the fuel.
Beyond that, co-generation systems are capable of achieving overall thermal efficiencies approaching 80%. However, integrating thermal energy recovery into existing buildings is difficult and expensive, though it can be quite economical in purpose-designed buildings. Proper matching of the electrical and thermal requirements of the building are critical, and storage may be required to time-shift the availability of the thermal energy.
Diesel-cycle engines are about 50% more efficient than Otto-cycle engines in both stationary and vehicle applications. However, there is resistance to diesel-cycle engines in the US for other than larger trucks. Hybrid vehicles offer the potential to recover a substantial portion of the energy rejected during vehicle braking, but at a significant initial cost penalty. Plug hybrid vehicles can improve the efficiency of the on-vehicle system, but are still burdened with the inefficiencies of the electric power generation system.
One loss the LLNL charts do not reflect is the inefficiency of buildings in using thermal energy for space conditioning, which can be quire large due to infiltration and conductive and radiative heat losses.
Were we to start over from scratch, we could build a far more efficient society, even within the limitations of the laws of thermodynamics. I cannot imagine the costs of doing so, however.

Ric,
The laws of thermodynamics has never met up with mechanics that was actually efficient. Current turbines were never designed for high efficiency just bad at bulk harvesting. The efficiency base 150 years ago on hydro-electric turbine was on how much space was needed between the outer casing to the turbine blade to turn. So, if it was 8%, then the turbine had to be 92% efficient.
Besides a manufacturers need to make a profit by having to manufacture 20 turbines when one could be sufficient if to take their place. Any energy NOT touching a turbine blade to move it is wasted energy.

Petrossa says:
April 10, 2011 at 10:51 am
The high cost of energy in France is the tax. 19.6% TVA on all energy. 0.0819 = 8.19cents becomes 9.828cent or 6.552 cent. I paid €200 tax on my recent fioul bill.

Jim Masterson says: “One of the ways to increase efficiency is to run heat engines at higher temperatures. A few years back there was lots of research into ceramic engines. Ceramic engines can run at higher temperature than metal engines but suffer from the usual problems with ceramics–they are brittle and easily crack and fail. ”
I worked on ceramic engine parts a few years ago, the major drawback was cost, they produced less pollution were more efficient but the cost was just to much. Our cheapest piston supplier could make them for $200 to $400 per piston, which may compete with exotic racing pistons, but not with $5 ones for normal engines. The cost to benefit ratio was just not good enough.
I remember from grad school discussions of turbine engines being much more efficient than piston engines for constant power generation. It would seem to make sense to use this style of engine for hybrid vehicles that use electric drive. Run the turbine at its optimum power rating to charge the batteries then shut it down once the batteries are charged.

Here in the northwest, Bonneville Power has been dealing with actual ‘rejected’ energy, not just wasted. This spring both wind and snowmelt have been extreme, so their windmills and their hydro dams have often been running at max. They can order the wind suppliers to disconnect, but they can’t bypass the dams because the anti-scientific anti-Darwinian Endangered Species Idiocy limits the spillway flow. So Bonneville has to turn off its fossil plants and turn down its nuke plant, and still has far more energy than the grid could carry.
Without the requirement of wind as part of their mix, this problem wouldn’t arise; and if they didn’t have to avoid embarrassing the %$#%#% ^&&%* ^&$#^ ^$# %#^&%^ !@#!@#!#!!!!!!! Aristocratic Royal Old-Growth Fish, the problem wouldn’t arise.

Tom Fuller says:
April 10, 2011 at 10:58 am
Not much discussion then about 2008 being 100 quads and 2009 being 95….

It’s because of reduced economic output and reduced demand. Millions of people are unemployed and millions more under employed. If we can get the government out of the way, a strong economic recovery will lead to increased consumption.

Cogeneration from engines and MicroTurbines for smaller site hosted DG is anywhere from 80% to 92% efficient running off of good old natural gas TODAY.
The chart also leaves out the thermal energy LOST/not recovered by PV that is now being recovered by the likes of Cognenra:
http://www.cogenra.com/why-solar-cogen/how-solar-cogen-works/
…thinking this equates to ~40-60% lost.
Given where our TOP energy use goes, I think traditional cogen from natural gas is the way, along with CNG, to dig our way out of our economic and energy woes.
The sooner we get started….the better.

A G Foster says:
April 10, 2011 at 1:17 pm
“The inefficiency of Microsoft is a major contributor to energy waste.”
The boot times of Windows these days doesn’t differ much from a Linux (having used Debian and Ubuntu) IMHO… After boot, neither operating system steals a significant amount of processor time. You should of course switch off services you don’t need like that Office indexing stuff.
If you’re earnest and want to save energy, try working with some Intel Atom 1.6 GHz system – consumes next to nothing and executes Win XP just fine IMHO.

There is 5.39% missing from the total energy, where did that go it can’t be all lost in independent rounding can it ?

I was blocked from posting this on facebook!

Nuke says:
April 10, 2011 at 1:23 pm
Tom Fuller says:
April 10, 2011 at 10:58 am
Not much discussion then about 2008 being 100 quads and 2009 being 95….
It’s because of reduced economic output and reduced demand. Millions of people are unemployed and millions more under employed. If we can get the government out of the way, a strong economic recovery will lead to increased consumption.
________________________
Energy use is a beneficial use. It is required to support billions of people. Just providing food consumes a large amount per capita. Is this bad? Not at all. We just need to generate the power in better ways.
Renewables are not up to the task, and never will be. We’ve been over this ground a lot, so I won’t bother getting into it again.
A natural gas -> nuclear roadmap is a good start. In CA, it is illegal to construct natural gas power plants (SB 1037 Kehoe 2005 [1]), the authority to decide the energy mix and control over fuel contracts goes to the Energy Commission. A 1976 law restricting construction of new nuclear power plants until high level waste storage issues are resolved remains in force [2].
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors are very close to being the solution. The older Molten Sodium Reactors that had trouble seem to be ones that used a solid form of fuel rather than liquid ThF6 [3]. MSRs with fuel rods can melt down. Also problems affect the Pebble Bed reactors [4]. The fuel pellets need to be reprocessed in order to burn a large percentage of the fuel. An all liquid reactor design can be constantly reprocessed and neutron absorbers removed automatically by outgassing from the liquid fluoride medium.
It seems that manufacturers need a requirement for elaborate fuel packaging in order to make a profit. Profits are not a bad thing, however, when you make a system too complicated unnecessarily and create inherent engineering flaws and process challenges, it seems to me there is an ethical problem involved.
References
1) ftp://leginfo.public.ca.gov/pub/05-06/bill/sen/sb_1001-1050/sb_1037_bill_20050929_chaptered.html
2) http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf65.html
3) http://energyfromthorium.com/essay3rs/
4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

Here’s another link from LLNL with further information on this graphic:
https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2010/NR-10-08-05.html
I’m surprised to see that Biomass, at 3.88 Quads, is about 10% of Petroleum at 35.27 Quads! That’s a substantial contribution.
Under the EPA’s “Tailoring Rule,” utilities have limited options for reducing greenhouse gases including increase energy efficiency.
One of my utility clients scoffs at that, saying that “we are a business and are doing everything we can to increase efficiency!” Amazing folks, I believe ’em.

Solar, hydro, wind, and biomass are all just different ways of harvesting the same thing. Solar can heat water for a boiler or directly generate electricity from photovoltaics. Or it can evaporate water and lift it to a higher elevation where it becomes potential gravitational energy that can spin a turbine as it falls to generate electricity. Biomass is just solar energy recently stored in chemical bonds of recently growing plants.
All the rest, except nuclear, are harvesting energy from the sun that was put into storage millions of years ago. So just about all the energy we consume is generated by solar power – the only difference is how and when that solar energy is stored and harvested.
Just wanted to point that out because ultimately the stored solar power in fossil fuels will run out and we’ll be forced to harvest more recent sunlight. The happy news is that there’s a million times more solar power available every minute than mankind consumes every minute. I expect that synthetic biology holds the key to harvesting it in a cost effective manner. Synthetic biology can produce direct replacements for liquid fuels and natural gas. The flaw in all alternatives is they only generate electricity and electricity is less than half our total energy consumption. In order to grow electricity’s share of energy consumption requires abandoning vast and costly infrastructure in both distrubution and consumption. It requires enormously costly added capacity to electrical grids. None of that has to happen nor will it happen. Synthetic biology is a drop in replacement for liquid and gaseous hydrocarbon fuels required no change in distribution or consumption infrastructure. For that reason, if nothing else, nuclear power was never a viable candidate for supplying more than half our energy consumption. Its much greater cost vs. natural gas and coal makes it even less viable which is why it’s 10% or less of global energy consumption. If it was less expensive than natural gas or coal then we’d have whole different ballgame depending on how much less expensive as the cost savings could help fund converting the ground transporation fleet from liquid to electric and pay for the added capacity in the electrical grid to deliver it to the point of consumption. It would have to be some damn big savings as electric vehicles are far more expensive than internal combustion counterparts. And you’ll never see the aviation fleet go electric. The energy density of batteries doesn’t even come close to the energy density of avgas and kerosene.

Bulldust,
As I pointed out on JoNova’s blog a while back, one QUAD is near enough to one exajoule (1 EJ = 1018 J). The 5.5% difference between a QUAD and an EJ is probably quite small compared to the errors of assumptions (especially conversion efficiencies) used to draw the charts.
If you think Btu are annoying, consider that airconditioning/refrigeration plant is rated in “tons”. Firkin madness!

“you can’t get 100% efficiency from thermal systems.”
I think that should read “heat engine” or “energy conversion” systems.
A room heater comprising a block of coal burning on a tray in the middle of a room is a “thermal system” with 100% efficiency.

A G Foster says:
April 10, 2011 at 1:17 pm

I have never heard it pointed out that it that turning off lights and computers in the summer saves a whole lot more money than in winter, since in the summer the AC must counteract the heat produced. In winter they just help heat the place up. The inefficiency of Microsoft is a major contributor to energy waste.

Forget about what Microsoft does. It doesn’t matter, but I will come to that.
As to the rest of your concerns, the answer depends on where you live and how much energy you use for either heating or AC or a mixture of both. Look up “heating-degree days”. Cooling-degree days go hand-in-hand with that. The results vary from location to location and predominantly with latitude.
However, there is something else that is often mentioned but hardly ever looked at in a practical fashion. That is the amount of energy a PC uses. Is it really such an enormous amount that switching it on or off makes a lot of difference?
That depends primarily on what sort of monitor is being used. For instance, if you wish to save a lot of energy, make sure you use an LCD screen. That will use hardly any energy. When I was still using a CRT, the energy consumption I had for my PC and peripherals was a little over 300W. When I switched to an LED screen, the energy consumed for everything I’ve got dropped down to 150W. That is a substantial energy saving. Right? No!
What I saved was off-set by increased heating costs. Our house is located in Central Alberta, Canada. It is being heated most of the year. If we are lucky, we don’t have the furnace ever running during a couple of months out of every year. At times its gets hot enough that I wish we had air conditioning, for maybe a total of ten days or a few more out of the year (and only for a few hours each day), but if it gets too hot, we can always go into the basement where it is 10 degrees Celsius cooler on a hot day, but the humidity gets to be fairly high there.
Anyway a 150Wh saved times 24 times 365, at the most (it’s closer to 12 hours a day), is only a very small portion of our total energy consumption during the year, at worst about 1,300kWh a year. Only a fraction of that can be saved, and most of that would be offset by increased heating costs. All of that would be wiped out many times over on account of baking putting a roast in the oven, cooking and making coffee.
I am not worried about what Microsoft does. I worry about who made my PC and, most importantly, the display screen. The consumption figures I see tell me that I don’t need to worry, that all of the energy my PC wastes is turned into heat, and that that heat generated keeps my heating bill down. It’s not worth it to bother figuring out the price of cash-flow differences. It would just be a model or an estimate anyway, and I can’t set up an experiment between two identical houses, having identical insulation factors and usage patterns, using different approaches to running a PC. I have a feeling that even if I could, the net differences in costs saved or paid would most probably be much smaller than the confidence interval for the estimate of the difference.

Note the rejected energy paths in the chart. There are two huge loss points. One is at the point of generation for electricity and the other is at the point of consumption for transporation.
The former is mostly losses in electrical transmission lines. The latter is inefficiency of internal combustion engines. Almost 50% of our energy consumption is wasted in these two loss leaders.
There’s not much that can be done to improve long distance electrical transmission efficiency barring the discovery of a cheap room temperature superconductor which isn’t likely. What would help a lot is decentralization of generation. Every kilowatt/hour of electricity that can be generated at the point of consumption is worth two kwh from a centralized source. In this is the appeal of solar photovoltaics with a grid tie. Further improvement of cost/performance of PV panels, mass production, and standardization could go a long way towards reducing the amount of electricity consumed from fossil fuel fired power plants. Every watt generated locally would reduce the demand on centralized sources by two watts. This is where the U.S. could be leading the way with government funded R&D, low interest loans, national standards, and laws requiring electric companies to allow customers to install standardized grid ties with fair prices paid for excess electricity fed back onto the grid.
In the transportation sector the cash for clunkers program was a good idea in principle but it was too loosely restricted to do a lot of good in that you didn’t have to take a huge step up in fuel economy (18mpg-24mpg) to get the rebate. That’s because the purpose of the program was also to stimulate sagging new auto sales after the financial crisis had reached main street.
The qualifiers, in my opinion, should have been any 50% improvement in fuel economy and included the purchase of used vehicles not just new ones. Also not requiring the destruction of the trade-in so long as the trade-in got 18 mpg or better. That way, for example, I could have traded in my 28mpg Honda Accord for a used 42mpg Jetta TDI and someone with a 16mpg clunker could have traded in for my Accord. Not everyone can afford a new vehicle but with a small subsidy and/or zero-interest government backed loans there could be a whole lot more efficiency brought to the transporation sector for very little cost to the taxpayers. I would also support, in general, the U.S. government stepping in to make these high efficiency TDI diesels much more accessible. Some sort of engine swap program where the fuel efficiency improvement is 50% might be feasible which could potentially reduce the number of scrapped vehicles whose only sin is an inefficient motor.

To the person in Canada with the cool-in-the-summer but high humidity basement…
I hear ya. The basement in my upstate NY home is the same way. The ground temperature there is 52F year-round not far below the frost line. A small dehumidifier will fix you right up and as an added bonus it produces distilled water which is handy for a lot of things like topping off your radiator or watering house plants.
In a rural south-central Texas home where I have enough land to experiment I wanted a high efficiency workshop with no interior walls and 12-foot ceilings and didn’t want to pay much for it. The year-round ground temperature in this location is 72F which is perfect. I cut a 36’w X 24’d section out of a hillside. I poured concrete to form the floor and three 12′ high walls, then used the tailings from the cut as backfill to bring the grade up even with the tops of the walls. That left a roof and one wall to build. The fourth wall faces north so I just framed that with 4×4’s and insulated with R-13 craft paper. Outside I just put up some inexpensive 3/8″ particle board siding which from experience I know holds up here very well without needing paint if the neutral gray color is acceptable to you. Inside I just covered it with 7/16″ OSB and painted it white. For the roof I used 24′ 2×10 pine timbers with 2′ spacing. One end of each timber is bolted to the top of the 4×4 wall timbers and the other end rests on top of the opposite concrete wall held in place by hurricane ties on that end. It’s a “flat” roof with a slope of 1:14. I covered the roof on top with two layers of 7/16″ OSB with the edges overlapped by 4 feet. Then tar paper on top of that then rool roofing (mineral/white) over the top of that. Roof insulation on the underside is R-30 then I just did the interior ceiling with 7/16″ OSB and painted it a light blue. I used a darker shade of blue concrete floor paint and painted the three concrete walls white with a masonry wall paint (Killz-2). For air-conditioning I put in two Sears 5000btu window air conditioners ($125 ea.) at opposite corners of the front wall and for heating I used two 8000 btu electric floor standing heaters from Wal-mart ($45 ea.) positioned right under the air conditioners. Both heaters and air conditioners have remote controls. I topped it off with a 20 pint/day Sears dehumidifier ($300).
About half the year I don’t need either air-conditioners or heaters running at all and the temperature stays pretty close to 72F with only less than 2F difference between day and night. The heaters come on, usually only briefly, when the average outdoor air temperature drops much below 72F. In the summer the air conditioners come on for a little while each day if the average outdoor temperature is much above 72F. They come on just enough to keep the relative humidity down near 50% so the dehumdifier seldom needs to do anything. In the cooler months the dehumidifier has some work to do when outdoor humidity is high but in that case the waste heat from the dehumidifier means the heaters have less work to do. I use high efficiency flourescent lighting of course but with a mostly white interior and no interior walls a single 15w compact flourescent lights the whole place enough to see your way around at night and in over the main workbench I use a standard 80W 4′ flourescent.
The whole shebang uses less than $100/yr in electricity for combined heating, cooling, and lighting. Total construction cost for 800’sq of high efficiency climate controlled comfort and workshop-quality interior was just $15/sq ft. With the exception of the concrete and the 24′ roof timbers all the materials were off-the-shelf from my local Home Depot and Sears stores. Labor was probably 500 hours but it was almost all just me building it except for cutting the hillside and pouring the slab & walls. Unskilled construction labor here runs about $10/hr if you don’t ask questions about why most of the crew don’t speak English so even if I didn’t supply any of the labor it still would have come in at $20/sq’. I’m really pleased with the result and building it was a labor of love which also provided a lot of good outdoor exercise that I don’t get designing computers and software or blogging or reading.

Dave Springer,
I hope the several things you know that just aren’t so don’t get you and/or a member of your family killed one day.
The energy rejected in the electric power generation/transmission/distribution system is primarily combustion and heat transfer inefficiency in the generation process. Transmission losses are on the order of 1%. Distribution losses are on the order of 8%, though they may double on peak.
Natural gas and propane produce primarily CO2 and H2O as combustion products. However, they also produce various aldehydes, as well as carbon monoxide. Improper assembly or maintenance of unvented heaters can result in production of up to 4,500 ppm CO in the flue gas. (That is not an estimate. I have measured that result in the laboratory.) CO emissions at that rate would kill the occupants of a room long before the ODS would operate to shut the burner off.
Your condensing natural gas furnace has an efficiency of ~94-96%. Your RV furnace must have a minimum efficiency of 80%, though it would be less efficient on a seasonal basis. It probably has an exhaust gas temperature of ~350F.
If you wish, you may click through to my website to confirm my credentials for providing the information above.

Oh Dave, what a lot of rubbish you talk. As Ed pointed out, nearly all the electricity loss is in combustion. With respect to transmission losses there are three things that can be done to reduce greatly the already small losses: 1. DC transmission, 2. convert 3 phase AC to 6 phase AC, increase frequency from 60 Hz to 300 Hz.
Your comments about nuclear economics are all rubbish. Cost of power is determined primarily by location and the distance to fuel sources. Where these are long, nuclear is invariably cheaper than any fossil alternatives.
And talking about emissions, all combustion produces NOx. The higher the combustion temperature, the more NOx it produces, meaning that nat gas produces lots for the energy extracted.

Ed Reid says:
April 11, 2011 at 1:45 pm

Dave Springer,
I hope the several things you know that just aren’t so don’t get you and/or a member of your family killed one day.
The energy rejected in the electric power generation/transmission/distribution system is primarily combustion and heat transfer inefficiency in the generation process. Transmission losses are on the order of 1%. Distribution losses are on the order of 8%, though they may double on peak.
Natural gas and propane produce primarily CO2 and H2O as combustion products. However, they also produce various aldehydes, as well as carbon monoxide. Improper assembly or maintenance of unvented heaters can result in production of up to 4,500 ppm CO in the flue gas. (That is not an estimate. I have measured that result in the laboratory.) CO emissions at that rate would kill the occupants of a room long before the ODS would operate to shut the burner off.
Your condensing natural gas furnace has an efficiency of ~94-96%. Your RV furnace must have a minimum efficiency of 80%, though it would be less efficient on a seasonal basis. It probably has an exhaust gas temperature of ~350F.
If you wish, you may click through to my website to confirm my credentials for providing the information above.

Transmission and distribution losses together in the US account for 6.6%. There’s more loss on top of that in the customer’s wiring before it reaches whatever device is actually consuming the electricity. I don’t have a figure for that on average but it can be substantial. In my case some of my more power thirsty appliances can drop my line voltage by ~10% from 126vac at the pole to 110vac at the appliance. The difference comes out as heat in the copper wiring of course. I start to worry about premature electric motor failures below 110vac as the motors themselves become less efficient and run hot in lower voltage situations.
Speaking of efficiency of electric motors we have to consider the efficiency of the electrical devices being powered. A typical AC induction motor of less than 1 horsepower (which covers vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, clothes washers, air conditioner compressors, blower fans, and the like operating at full rated load is somewhere south of 60% efficient. Operating at anything less than full rated load the efficiency falls off further. At 10% of rated load you’re looking at about 20% efficiency.
Light bulbs are even worse (unless you want the waste heat). Even CFLs give off more heat than light and that’s for a bare bulb so you can subtract even more (10 – 20%) from its efficiency if it has some kind of diffusion filter like a lampshade or grating or whatever else might be used to diffuse the bare bulb glare.
On the natural gas CO emissions thanks for the tip. My mother has been using a gas range (no vent) in her small kitchen for 60 years. For 40 of those years there was an unvented gas refrigerator in the same room. I’m sure she’ll appreciate knowing it might kill her real soon now and she should invest in a hood with a vent fan and keep it running whenever the stove is being used.
I see you ignored my admonition that one should have a CO alarm if you’re going to use a ventless gas heater anywhere where there isn’t a reasonable amount of indoor/outdoor air exchange happening.