100,000 kWh of energy is ballpark equivalent to the number of calories baleen whales -- the huge guys -- use each year! It's hard to think that 300 million humans could use a lot of energy and resources, but how about 300 million huge whales? :)
One way of thinking of things is that only 1% of the energy we metabolize in North America is food energy. The other 99% of energy goes towards shelter, heating, transportation, digging resources, growing food etc.
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One very encouraging thing is that most of our energy comes from burning fossil fuels, in which process we lose 50% (combined cycle natural gas turbine) to 80% (gasoline car) of the starting energy, those starting kWh's. Part of the reason US energy intensity has gone down is the replacement of coal power plants (lose 70%) with natural gas power plants (lose 50%) -- and increasingly with renewable electricity, too.
Direct electrification has much fewer losses (call it 10% for electric transmission) so we can provide the same final energy needs ("drive 10 miles") with far less primary energy. So we can actually shrink that 100,000 kWh down a lot while still meeting our final energy needs!
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We just have to avoid aiming for a utopia of 100% electrification (some people will still want fireplaces or gas cook stoves) because chasing utopias too hard, seems to be how we wind up in dystopias... 😅
The 300-million-baleen-whale image is genuinely one of the best things anyone has ever said to me about energy consumption, and I am going to use it constantly and cite you every time, probably inaccurately.
The 1%/99% food-to-everything-else ratio is something I sorta knew was lopsided, but seeing it that starkly is still jarring!
I'm always chasing utopia (Always Coming Home to channel Le Guin), so I think with a little change of perception and lots of imagination we can "get there" (where-ever that may be, as long as it's rooted here in more meaningful ways than current ontologies of place-based wisdom in the Western paradigms).
Oh, oh!
100,000 kWh of energy is ballpark equivalent to the number of calories baleen whales -- the huge guys -- use each year! It's hard to think that 300 million humans could use a lot of energy and resources, but how about 300 million huge whales? :)
One way of thinking of things is that only 1% of the energy we metabolize in North America is food energy. The other 99% of energy goes towards shelter, heating, transportation, digging resources, growing food etc.
- - - - - - - -
One very encouraging thing is that most of our energy comes from burning fossil fuels, in which process we lose 50% (combined cycle natural gas turbine) to 80% (gasoline car) of the starting energy, those starting kWh's. Part of the reason US energy intensity has gone down is the replacement of coal power plants (lose 70%) with natural gas power plants (lose 50%) -- and increasingly with renewable electricity, too.
Direct electrification has much fewer losses (call it 10% for electric transmission) so we can provide the same final energy needs ("drive 10 miles") with far less primary energy. So we can actually shrink that 100,000 kWh down a lot while still meeting our final energy needs!
- - - - - - - - -
We just have to avoid aiming for a utopia of 100% electrification (some people will still want fireplaces or gas cook stoves) because chasing utopias too hard, seems to be how we wind up in dystopias... 😅
The 300-million-baleen-whale image is genuinely one of the best things anyone has ever said to me about energy consumption, and I am going to use it constantly and cite you every time, probably inaccurately.
The 1%/99% food-to-everything-else ratio is something I sorta knew was lopsided, but seeing it that starkly is still jarring!
I'm always chasing utopia (Always Coming Home to channel Le Guin), so I think with a little change of perception and lots of imagination we can "get there" (where-ever that may be, as long as it's rooted here in more meaningful ways than current ontologies of place-based wisdom in the Western paradigms).