Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (July 2012)

US Wastes 61–86% Of Its Energy

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

Originally published on Outlier, Opower’s blog.
by Barry Fischer, Opower’s head writer

An updated analysis published last month by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory suggests that the USA is just 39% energy efficient.

Put another way, more than half (i.e. 61%) of the energy that flows through our economy is ultimately wasted.

US energy waste UK

The predominance of inefficiency is conveyed by the energy-flow diagram below: it shows the country’s energy fuel inputs (e.g. coal, natural gas) on the left side, and end-use energy consumption (e.g. residential, industrial, transportation) on the right side.

Of the 95.1 quadrillion British Thermal Units (known as “quads”) of raw energy inputs that flowed into the US economy in 2012, only 37.0 quads were constructively used at the end of the day (as “energy services”). The other 58.1 quads were, in essence, wasted. This waste, summarized in the top right of the diagram, is euphemistically classified as “rejected energy.”

US energy production waste
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (July 2012)

Chip in a few dollars a month to help support independent cleantech coverage that helps to accelerate the cleantech revolution!

As has been the case for decades, most of the economy’s energy waste stems from electricity generation (because most power plants are relatively inefficient) and the transportation sector (internal-combustion vehicles are also notoriously inefficient, but they are getting better).

One should not expect any economy, power plant, or car to be 100% efficient. Indeed, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that achieving perfect thermal efficiency is as possible as unscrambling an egg. But 39% efficiency? It certainly leaves some major room for improvement.

And some experts argue that even 39% efficiency is painting a rosy picture: defining energy as the “capacity to do useful work” (rather than strictly as a commodity measured by its energy content), physicist Robert Ayres and his colleagues estimate that the true energy efficiency of the US economy is closer to 14%.

So how does Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s 2012 energy flow analysis compare to its analyses in recent years? Strikingly, their findings suggest that 2012 was the most energy-wasteful year in more than a decade (and the third most profligate year since LLNL began producing these studies in the 1970s). By LLNL’s historical calculations, the amount of energy wasted annually has hovered between 50-58% during the last ten years. But in 2012, their waste calculation shot up to 61%.

Why? AJ Simon, a senior researcher at LLNL who leads the energy flow studies, told Opower that the increased waste number stems in part from updated assumptions about the end-use efficiency of vehicles and household appliances. Specifically, a pair of recent analyses of overall energy consumption in the transportation and residential sectors prompted LLNL to adopt more realistic engineering estimates for 2012.

Simon’s team now estimates that US cars, trains, planes and the like are on average 21% efficient (rather than 25%, as previously surmised) and US household energy uses like heating, cooling, and lighting are on average 65% efficient (rather than 80%). Holistically, these estimates may yet still be overly optimistic, in that they don’t reflect behavior-related energy inefficiencies, such as over-drying one’s clothes or leaving the A/C running in an unoccupied house.

Feeling nostalgic for a time when the US economy used more energy than it wasted? You’ll have to go back to 1970, in the days when LLNL’s diagrams weren’t so colorful. In that year (which also featured the first Earth Day celebration), the country eked out a slightly better than 50% efficiency performance, wherein 31.1 quads of “useful energy” eclipsed 30.6 quads of “rejected energy.”

US energy use waste 1970
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (November 1973)

Since 1970, however, the substantial growth in energy use for electricity and transportation — sectors that, as mentioned above, are historically poor at turning fuel into work — has caused energy waste to gradually prevail over energy productivity.

Fortunately, though, the nation is seeing a promising wave of technological advancesutility-sector innovation, behavioral science approaches, and policy breakthroughs that are helping to make energy productivity not just a serendipitous achievement in 1970, but an enduring reality for the decades ahead.

Follow @OpowerOutlier on Twitter

Note: Comparison between US energy waste and UK energy consumption is based on 2012 US waste of58.1 quads and 2012 UK consumption of 8.456 quads


Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.

Latest CleanTechnica TV Video


Advertisement
 
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.

Guest Contributor

We publish a number of guest posts from experts in a large variety of fields. This is our contributor account for those special people, organizations, agencies, and companies.

Guest Contributor has 4378 posts and counting. See all posts by Guest Contributor