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| Estimated U. S. Energy Consumption in 2023: 93.6 Quads |
Found this on Casey Handmer's Blog. Click to embiggenate. A quad is a unit of measurement equal to one quadrillion (10^15) British Thermal Units (BTUs). I suspect that Rejected Energy (the gray box in the upper right corner of the chart) is energy that is converted to heat and dissipated, and Energy Services (the block box in the lower right corner) is energy that was used for useful things. So roughly one third of the 93.6 quadrillion BTUs were used to do something useful, and the other two-thirds was was converted to waste heat. This is a bunch, but it is negligible compared to the zillion BTUs the sun delivers every day.
1 comment:
This strikes me as a very misleading graphic. This is quite likely intentional. Exemplum gratia: If I bake a loaf of bread, is the heat not transferred to the dough 'waste heat'? I could, I suppose, use a smaller oven. But the I'd end up with a soggy loaf of bread, and STILL need a real full sized oven for the holiday turkey.
But lumping solar and wind (non-dispatchable sources) along with Nuke and Hydro? Dead solid and dispatchable baseline energy providers? It is to laugh!
When I lived in South Houston I could read a book in the back yard by the light of the Pasadena flare stacks. Now THAT pissed me off. (Co-gen, anyone?)
Yes, there is a lot of waste heat being radiated. In many cases it makes sense to reclaim it - nuke subs and carriers do so already, IIRC. In most cases it's simply not worth the considerable investment to retrofit these things.
But when was the last big new refinery built? Not LPG processing plant, that's a different thing. One that takes in crude and produces refined hydrocarbons? And will the permitting agencies encourage, allow, or forbid any variations from the existing norm, inefficient as it is?
You can guess how I'll bet.
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