Energy flow diagrams

 This page at Laurence Livermore National Laboratory is a great time waster. I recommend looking at the following geographies for different years:

  • Texas <-- industry has become less efficient?
  • California <-- not much change, despite the perception of them being a greening economy
  • Iceland <-- it helps to live on top of submerged volcanoes
  • Tanzania <-- huge country, they use no energy, and what they do use comes from biomass.
  • Saudi Arabia <-- no surprise
  • Canada <-- spot the oil sands gas consumption!
  • China is ten times bigger than Canada as far as energy goes, in almost all aspects. Yet their population is almost 40 times more. It's our SUVs and shopping malls!
If you squint just right at some location over a decade, you can see North America replacing coal with natural gas. Alternative sources are making some headway, but aren't significant (yet?).

One thing I don't understand is why there is more rejected energy, or wasted energy now compared to a decade or more ago. Look at Colorado from 2010 to 2021. Industry became much less efficient. Below are Sankey diagrams for 2014 and 2015. The shift happened between 2014 and 2015. Efficiency went from 40% in 2014 for energy that had flowed going to services, and the rest rejected, immediately to 33% in 2015. Industrial efficiency dropped from 80% to 50%!

I thought it might be waste heat from natural gas fired industries, but not really. Mansplain it for me!






Eagerly waiting for a post-COVID update. Most countries are only represented as of 2017.

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