Scale of US Energy Usage and How it Relates to Reneweable Energy

WSJ Oped on the Scale of US Energy Usage

This op Ed has some great points about US energy usage and what options we have with fossil fuel alternatives. He converts everything into one useful equivalent form of energy, and then shares the scale with you.

Highlights:
1 barrel of oil = 1.64 Mega Watt hours of energy (your electric bill is in Kilo Watt hours)
1KW-hour = 1000x less energy 1 MW - hour
45,493,000 megawatt-hours = total renewable energy produced in US in 2008 All sources
4,118,198,000 megawatt-hours = total US 2008 electrical energy produced including Above
So, renewable is currently 1.1% of total Electric production

45,493,000 megawatt-hours = 27.7 million barrels of oil equivalent (renewable energy)
76,000 barrels of oil per day = (27.7 million barrels / 365 days)

47.4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day = US Total energy (Oil, Nuke, Nat Gas, Hydro, etc)

of that 47.4 Million Barrels of oil equivalent used by the US each Day!
- actual oil = 19 million barrels per day
- natural gas = 11.9 million barrels per day equivalent
- coal = 11.5 million barrels per day equivalent
- Nuke = 3.8 million barrels per day equivalent
- Hydro = 1.1 million barrels per day equivalent
leaving 100,000 for everything else (solar, wind, wood, etc)

The point being that no matter what we do, it's going to take a long time to make enough solar panels, wind turbines, and whatever else we need to replace all of that. Forgetting the huge sums of cash (gas stations, refineries, pipelines coal mines, oil rigs, cars, gas and oil heaters in residences, oven ranges) invested in what we want to replace.

A Rational Take on GW

Op Ed piece in the Boston Globe on GW

If all that were happening on the climate-change front, do you think you'd be hearing about it on the news? Seeing it on Page 1 of your daily paper? Would politicians be exclaiming that global warming was even more of a crisis than they'd thought? Would environmentalists be skewering global-warming "deniers" for clinging to their skepticism despite the growing case against it?

No doubt.

Need I say any more...