Robert Rand, BURN Editor

When you think about political power, electricity probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But when you think about the ability – or more importantly, the inability – of a government to deliver electricity to its citizens, the political nature of energy transmission becomes clear.

Ask any mayor or governor who worries about the wrath of constituents during extended power outages, such as those that occurred last year during Hurricane Sandy. The politics of Sandy were captured in this headline from the Associated Press: “Sandy a Super Test for Bloomberg, Christie, Cuomo.”

One of the first politicians to grasp the political nature of electricity was neither from New York nor New Jersey. He was Vladimir Ilych Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union. In the early years of the USSR the new Bolshevik government faced the daunting challenge of extending control over the vast Russian landmass. Lenin framed the issue this way: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”

Lenin understood that a government is as good as its grid. The ability to provide a reliable source of electricity is one of the most important measures of effective state governance. Lay a electrical grid across the land and the people will be satisfied and prosper.

In prosperous, developed countries, the grid is so well-established and electricity so plentiful that it’s taken for granted. Fail to lay down a reliable grid, or fail to make quick repairs when the power goes out, and a government’s credibility may tatter, with political, economic and social consequences to follow.

Which makes an event in the Middle East last week especially interesting.  It happened in Syria, which is embroiled in a God awful civil war that has claimed more than 70,000 lives. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has spent most of the past few months hunkered down in the presidential palace in Damascus.

Last Wednesday, Assad made a rare public appearance. He visited a power station in the city center.

Al-Assad’s message: Don’t worry, be happy. I can deliver electricity to the people of Damascus. I still have political power.

The problem, of course, is the conundrum Assad will face if anti-government fighters manage to turn off the lights.

This summer, BURN will feature a one-hour radio and multimedia special on our nation’s electrical grid system – how it was built, how it works, and what happens when it doesn’t. Follow us here, on Facebook, SoundCloud, and Twitter all next month to hear great excerpts, see photos, and learn more about America’s grid.

Robert Rand, BURN Editor 

Carey King, BURN Contributor

Stein’s Law states: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

For nearly 60 years after World War II, the percent of U.S. household income spent on food and energy – or personal consumption expenditures (PCE) – declined.

But then things started to change. Again. Between 1998 and 2002, PCE for food and energy stopped declining and started increasing. The PCE for “food + energy” reached a minimum of 18% in 2002. Whether or not this will be the minimum percentage PCE for “food + energy” for the US for all time is a good question.

But this percentage cannot decrease forever because energy and food will never be free – back to Stein’s Law. As we’ll see shortly, the reversal of these trends could be an indicator of a fundamental transformation for our economy and society.

Figure 1. Personal consumption expenditures of US households expressed as a percentage of total expenditures. Data are from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis Table 2.3.5. Food = “Food and beverages purchased for off-premises consumption” and “Food services and accommodations.” Energy = “gasoline and other energy goods and of electricity and gas.”

The reason to consider both the PCE for energy and food is because food was fundamentally an energy source of pre-industrial power from humans and animals. Before fossil fuels and significant industrialization using wind, wood, and water power in the early 1800s, food was the major energy resource for prime movers.

The food that animals and people ate was the fuel that powered them, and therefore the machines and tools they operated. Thus, the quantity of food and fodder produced from the land had a major influence on the amount of power for agriculture and a little industry.

In a large sense, fossil fuels and subsequent technologies drove down the relative cost of food and energy. Those energy-dense resources enabled the technical change that generated economic growth. Fossil fuels also meant fewer and fewer workers were needed to grow food and mine energy sources.

Since 2002, we have been spending an increasingly higher proportion of our personal income on food and energy, due to resource scarcity. Thus, there has been an increased demand for more investment (capital and labor) in these basic needs.

In other words, food and energy have become increasingly scarce – and therefore, more expensive – because of the rising demands for each around the world.

As a result, an increasing proportion of workers and other resources may be needed to produce the same quantity of food and energy (fossil and renewable), possibly with declining per capita consumption. This is the exact opposite trend of fossil-fueled industrialization!

The truth is that constraints in food and energy supplies, together with consumption patterns (and demographics, too, but that’s another subject) have caught up with much of the ‘advanced’ economies (e.g. EU, US, Japan). Unconventional oil alternatives – oil sands, deepwater, oil shale, biofuels – don’t have the same level of pure energetic value as energy sources of the past.

In considering the ongoing debate about American jobs and decreasing unemployment rates, note how the oil and gas commercials tout the jobs they create. Then, remember the figure in this article. Historically, the economy has grown the most when we’re moving jobs out of the energy sectors.

The rising cost of energy is a primary cause of our slow economy, and there is a limited rate at which we can adjust to this new reality. The sooner citizens, businesses, and politicians accept this fact, the better we will be in the future.

Carey King is a research associate in the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy. King researches energy systems and how they work together and within the environment. King contributes blog posts for Environmental Research Web, under Energy – The Nexus of Everything.

Wind is the kinetic energy of molecules in the air. Wind has powered ships and mills for centuries or longer.

Modern windmills convert the wind into rotational energy by allowing the air molecules to bombard the blades, turning them. The blades are connected to turbines, which generate electricity from that rotational energy.

Wind energy is one of the cleanest forms of energy available because it doesn’t require a fuel or produce greenhouse gas or other bi-products, outside of those from production and maintenance of equipment and transmission.

Wind turbines themselves take up only a small area compared to their generating potential, making it possible to install them on agricultural, forest, or grazing lands.

RAPID GROWTH

In just ten years, wind power in the United States grew more than ten-fold, from just over 2,000 megawatts in 1999 to more than 34,000 megawatts in 2009, when wind accounted for 9 percent of renewable energy produced in the country and more than geothermal and solar combined.

Here’s an animated map of wind development from 2000 to 2010.

Texas, Iowa, and Minnesota had the greatest wind capacity in 2010. Additionally, at least 27 other states used wind to generate electricity that year.

DRAWBACKS TO WIND ENERGY

Wind is an intermittent resource, meaning that the windmills can’t continuously and predictably produce energy. They only work when the wind blows, and they can only work as hard as the wind is blowing at that time.

Research is ongoing into predicting what regions of the country have significant wind resources suitable for wind development, a process that requires computer programming and meteorological knowledge.

Furthermore, public and private researchers are working to produce better models of wind on an hourly, daily, and seasonal basis to make it easier for wind energy producers to forecast their output and sell it ahead of time.

Another major hurdle to wind power is that it is expensive compared with fossil fuel-based electricity. Modern windmills cost a lot to design and build, especially as they have to be strong enough to endure extreme weather, even though they will mostly operate in moderate weather. That makes competing with other energy sources difficult without government intervention.

Some people don’t like the way windmills look, and windmills can also kill bats and birds, though newer designs have slower and less deadly blades. A 2010 study published in the Journal of Ornithology estimated that windmills kill around 440,000 birds every year. However, the same study showed that house cats kill more than 1,000 times that number, as many as 500 billion per year.

SOURCES

• U.S. Energy Information Administration
• National Renewable Energy Laboratory
• “Tweety was right: cats are a bird’s no 1 enemy.” New York Times. March 20, 2011

THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY

The hydrogen economy is a hypothetical future in which energy can be bought, sold, stored, and transported in a currency of hydrogen, much like today’s energy is often exchanged in electricity. Because hydrogen doesn’t need to be attached to the electricity grid, it can be used in forms of transportation like buses and cars.

The end-user of the hydrogen, for example an automobile driver, doesn’t experience significant pollution beyond the formation of water from burning the hydrogen.

For more details about the hydrogen economy see here.

Hydrogen, a gas, isn’t a fuel like gasoline or coal; hydrogen is a way to store and transport energy made from other fuels, like a battery or electricity. Unlike fossil fuels, pure hydrogen isn’t stable, so forming hydrogen in the first place requires energy and produces carbon dioxide, and storing hydrogen involves special considerations because this light gas is very flammable and also quickens rust and oxidation in pipelines and storage containers.

HOW HYDROGEN IS DIFFERENT FROM FOSSIL FUELS

Allowing hydrogen (a gas) to burn in the presence of oxygen releases that stored energy in the form of heat. Hydrogen can also be reacted in a fuel cell to produce electricity. In either case, electricity or heat can then be used to power cars or any number of other devices. Gasoline, biofuels, wood, and other carbon-based fuels all produce carbon dioxide when they are burned, and rising carbon dioxide levels are widely implicated in climate change. Burning hydrogen produces energy, water and a few trace compounds, but it doesn’t produce carbon dioxide.

2 H₂ (hydrogen gas) + O₂ (oxygen gas) = 2 H₂O (water vapor) + energy

It’s unclear what widespread emission of water vapor could do. According to recent published estimates, atmospheric water vapor is responsible for 75 percent of the greenhouse effect. However, water vapor can condense, and it’s naturally-occurring in the atmosphere. It is much easier to trap and transform to liquid than the carbon dioxide normally emitted by burning gasoline. Carbon dioxide won’t form a liquid at atmospheric temperatures and will solidify into dry ice only below -108.4 Fahrenheit, so proponents say it can be easier to trap the vapor in hydrogen-powered machines.

If the energy used to generate and purify and store and ship hydrogen doesn’t require emitting greenhouse gases or toxics, proponents argue that hydrogen is a clean alternative.

SOURCES OF HYDROGEN: THE UNFORTUNATE REALITY TODAY

Hydrogen, not carbon, is the most prevalent atom in the human body. There are two hydrogen atoms in every water molecule, and as many as hundreds of hydrogen atoms on the basic building blocks of life, from DNA to plant fibers. Nonetheless, harvesting the hydrogen atoms out of any of these structures to make hydrogen fuel isn’t easy because hydrogen likes to be bonded to carbon or oxygen; it doesn’t like to be elemental gas.

To produce pure hydrogen today, industries use primary fuel source like petroleum, natural gas, coal, or biomass. Through chemical processing, the hydrogen atoms are stripped from the fuel by way of an input of energy from electricity (more than 80 percent of which comes from fossil fuels in the United States). Furthermore, the leftover material from the stripping is carbon dioxide, the same carbon dioxide that would have been produced if the fuel was burned in an engine.

The reactions for various fuel to hydrogen conversions can be found on the U.S. Department of Energy website here.

Hydrogen can also be produced, at great energy loss, through the electrolysis of water: using electricity, water is divided into its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen. However, water electrolysis is the least carbon-neutral hydrogen production method, and it is very expensive ($3 to $6 per kilogram instead of a little more than $1 in the case of using coal for hydrogen), according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. All hydrogen production methods result in a net energy loss.

 

 

Most of the world’s energy can go back to our sun. Every day we are heated by its electromagnetic rays, and plants use the sun’s energy to make sugars and ultimately proteins and other good things to eat. Fossil fuels were also once made from these plant and other organisms that relied on the sun’s energy millions of years ago. Today, humans can convert the sun’s energy directly into electricity, through solar thermal and solar photovoltaic systems.

SOLAR THERMAL OR PHOTOVOLTAIC?

Solar panels, also called solar thermal, convert sunlight to heat and then heat to electricity. Photovoltaic cells, or solar cells, convert sunlight directly into electric current by way of carefully-engineered semiconductor materials.

Though solar photovoltaics are more efficient converters of sunlight, they are also more expensive.

As of May 2011, the world’s largest solar power plant is a concentrating solar thermal power plant in the Mohave desert in California. Solar Energy Generating Systems has a capacity of 310 megawatts and uses parabola-shaped reflective troughs to concentrate electromagnetic radiation.

The world’s largest solar photovoltaic plant is probably the Sarnia Solar Project in Ontario, Canada. It has a capacity of roughly 80 megawatts.

HOW SOLAR THERMAL WORKS

Sunlight heats a design element (water, air, chemical fluids), and that thermal energy is transmitted for other applications, such as heating water, heating space, or generating electricity. In solar thermal power plants, sunlight heats a specialized fluid, which in turn heats water into steam, which can run turbines and produce electricity.

Solar thermal power plants use concentrators that bounce the sunlight off elliptical mirrors to a central tube, in which the specialized fluid lies.

HOW PHOTOVOLTAICS WORK

Photovoltaic cells are made of specialized diodes. Electrons (natural components of atoms) in the photovoltaic cells absorb light, which excites them to a state where they can be conducted as electrical current. This difference in energy, between the valence band (the state of a normal electron staying around its home atom) to the conduction band (electron free to move between atoms) is called the band gap.

Well-engineered photovoltaics have a band gap that coincides with the energies of as broad a spectrum of light as possible, to convert the maximum amount of the sunlight into electricity.

As sunlight energy pops electrons into the conduction band and away from their home atoms, an electric field is produced. The negatively-charged electrons separate from the positively-charged “holes” they leave behind, so that when electrons are freed into the conduction band, they move as electric current in the electric field, electricity.

PHOTOVOLTAICS ARE MADE OF SPECIALIZED MATERIALS

An ever-expanding variety of semiconductor materials can be used to make solar cells; universities and companies worldwide are researching these options, from special bio-plastics to semiconductor nanocrystals. Nonetheless, the photovoltaic cells available today require precise manufacturing conditions and are therefore far more expensive to produce than solar panels.

Silicon has to be processed under clean room conditions — carefully regulated atmospheres — to remove impurities and prevent introducing contaminants, both of which can change the band gap. Thin film-based photovoltaics require special production methods, like chemical vapor deposition. Semiconductor processing also uses strong acids and often dangerous chemicals for etching.

Today, commercially-sold cells are made from purified silicon or other crystalline semiconductors like cadmium telluride or copper indium gallium selenide.

WHERE DO WE GET THE STARTING MATERIALS?

Silicon is plentiful in the Earth’s crust. Cadmium is a readily available but highly toxic heavy metal, as is arsenic, another chemical used in some cells. As tellurium demand is only recently rising in response to solar demand, it’s unknown what the global supply is for this unusual element but it may be quite abundant. Photovoltaics are a lively area of research, and the future production and environmental costs of starter materials, production, and pollution are difficult to predict.

California, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Michigan produced the most photovoltaics in 2009. However, that year, 58 percent of photovoltaics were imports, primarily from Asian countries like China, Japan, and the Philippines.

LED TECHNOLOGY: MORE THAN HEADLAMPS

Photovoltaic cells work in the opposite direction of light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. LEDs are used interchangeably with other lighting, like light bulbs. However, LED’s work in a completely different manner, far closer to the way photovoltaics work.

Click here see a bar chart comparing how much energy is used by various light sources.

LEDs absorb energy in the form of electricity, exciting electrons into the conduction band. When the electrons in the semiconductor material drop back into the valence band from the conduction band, they emit energy in the form of photons, or electromagnetic radiation.

It’s a highly efficient process because energy isn’t wasted on producing heat, which happens with standard tungsten filament bulbs. LEDs also last a much longer time as they do not have filaments to burn out, and because they are very small and several units are used to replace one large traditional lamp, they do not all burn out at once. That makes LEDs a good choice for stoplights or other safety critical applications.

 

Energy comes in two basic forms: potential and kinetic.

Potential Energy is any type of stored energy; it isn’t shown through movement. Potential energy can be chemical, nuclear, gravitational, or mechanical.

Kinetic Energy is the energy of movements: the motion of objects (from people to planets), the vibrations of atoms by sound waves or in thermal energy (heat), the electromagnetic energy of the movements of light waves, and the motion of electrons in electricity.

Each form of energy can be transformed into any of the other forms, but energy isn’t destroyed or created. Losses of energy can always be accounted for by small transformations to other types of energy, like sound and heat. Power plants convert potential energy or kinetic energy into electricity, a type of kinetic energy, and electricity in turn can be converted back into other forms of energy, like heat in an oven or light from a lamp.

 

Forms of Potential Energy

CHEMICAL

Chemical energy is stored in the bonds between atoms. (See here for more about atoms.) This stored energy is released and absorbed when bonds are broken and new bonds are formed –  chemical reactions. Chemical reactions change the way atoms are arranged. Like letters of the alphabet that can be rearranged to form new words with very different meanings, atoms go through chemical reactions to be reorganized to form new compounds  with vastly different properties. Each compound has its own chemical energy associated with the bonds between the atoms it contains.

When we burn sugar (a compound made of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon) during exercise, it’s components are reorganized into water (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2). These reactions both absorb and release energy, but the net reaction releases energy.

Chemical reactions that produce net energy are called exothermic. When gasoline is burned, the reactions taking place are exothermic and thermal energy is released, which can be used to power an engine. Meanwhile, chemical reactions that absorb net energy are called endothermic.

 

NUCLEAR

Nuclear energy is the stored potential of the nucleus, or center, of an individual atom. Most atoms are stable on Earth; they retain their identities as particular elements, like hydrogen, helium, iron, and carbon, as identified in the Periodic Table of Elements. Nuclear reactions change the fundamental identity of elements.

Unlike everyday chemical reactions that change how atoms are stuck together (rearranging the letters of a word), nuclear reactions change the name of the atoms themselves. (Sort of as if the letter “m” was split into the letters “r” and “n,” or the letters “l” and “o” combined to make the letter “b”).  In nuclear reactions, atoms split apart or join together to form new kinds of atoms, called fission and fusion, respectively.

When atoms split apart or fuse together, they release stored nuclear energy, sometimes in huge quantities.

Today’s nuclear power plants are fueled by fission, a breaking apart of uranium or plutonium atoms that releases lots of energy. Hydrogen atoms in the sun experience nuclear fusion, combining to form helium and subsequently releasing large amounts of kinetic energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation and heat.

 

ELASTIC

Elastic energy can be stored mechanically in a compressed gas or liquid, a coiled spring, or a stretched elastic band. On an atomic scale, the basis for the energy is a reversible strain placed on the bonds between atoms, meaning there’s no permanent change to the material.

These bonds absorb energy as they are stressed, and release that energy as they are relaxed.

 

GRAVITATIONAL

Systems can build up gravitational energy as mass moves away from the center of Earth or other objects that are large enough to generate significant gravity (the sun, other planets and stars).

For example, the farther you lift an anvil away from the ground, the more potential energy it gains. The energy used to lift the anvil is called work, and the more work performed, the more potential energy the anvil gains. If the anvil is dropped, that potential energy becomes kinetic energy as the anvil moves faster and faster toward Earth.

 

 

Forms of Kinetic Energy

MOTION

A moving object has kinetic energy. A basketball passed between players shows translational energy in the motion that gets the ball from player A to player B. That kinetic energy is proportional to the ball’s mass and the square of its velocity. To throw the same ball twice as fast, a player uses four times the energy.

If a player shoots a basketball with backspin or topspin, the basketball will also have rotational energy as it spins through the air. Rotational energy is proportional to how quickly the ball spins, as well as the ball’s mass, and the size and shape of the ball. A hollow ball needs more energy than a solid ball of equal mass to spin at the same rate. The hollow ball requires more energy because it’s mass is farther from its center.

In shooting a basketball, players often try to add rotational energy as backspin, because it results in the greatest slowdown in speed when the basketball hits the rim or the backboard, increasing the chance that the ball stays near the basket. The opposite direction of spin, a topspin, can be used in games like tennis, because it will help speed up a ball after impact and lowers the angle it travels after the bounce.

 

THERMAL ENERGY AND TEMPERATURE

Heat and thermal energy are directly related to temperature. We can’t see individual atoms vibrating, but we can feel their kinetic energies as temperature, which is a reflection of the energy with which atoms vibrate. When there’s a difference between the temperature of the environment and a system within it, thermal energy is transferred between them as heat.

A hot cup of tea in a cool room loses some of its thermal energy as heat flows from the tea to the room. The atoms in the hot tea slow their vibrating as the tea loses heat, and over a few hours the tea cools to the same temperature as the room. At the same time, the room gains the lost thermal energy from the tea, but because the room is much larger than the tea, the temperature of the room increases by so little a person wouldn’t notice it.

Adjacent objects that are different temperatures will spontaneously transfer heat to try to come to the same temperature. However, how much energy it takes to change the temperature of an object is based on what its made of, a principle called heat capacity or thermal capacity. Water has a higher heat capacity than steel, for example. An empty pot on the stove takes almost no time to get to 212 degrees Fahrenheit (the boiling temperature of water). A pot half-full of water will take much longer to reach the same temperature, because water needs to absorb more energy — per weight, per degree — to get as hot as metal.

 

SOUND

Sound waves are made through the transmitted vibration of atoms in bulk — though atoms can also vibrate through heat — and sound can travel by the motion of atoms regardless of whether they are in liquid, solid, or gaseous states. Sound cannot travel in a vacuum because a vacuum has no atoms to transmit the vibration.

Solids, liquids, and gases transmit sounds as waves, but the atoms that pass along the sound don’t travel (unlike the photons in light). The sound wave travels between atoms, like people passing along a “wave” in a sports stadium. Sounds have different frequencies and wavelengths (related to pitch) and different magnitudes (related to how loud).

Even though radio waves can transmit information about sound, they are a completely different kind of energy, called electromagnetic.

 

ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION

Electromagnetic energy is the same as radiation or light energy. This type of kinetic energy can take the form of visible light waves, like the light from a candle or a light bulb, or invisible waves, like radio waves, microwaves, x-rays and gamma rays. Radiation — whether it’s coming from a candle or nuclear fission of uranium — can travel in a vacuum, and physicists like to think of electromagnetic radiation as divided into tiny energy packets called photons. Each photon has a characteristic frequency, wavelength, and energy, but all photons travel at the same speed, the speed of light, or nearly 1 billion feet per second.

Electromagnetic energy can be converted to stored chemical energy by plants during photosynthesis, the process by which plants, algae, and some other small organisms use the sun’s electromagnetic radiation to turn carbon dioxide gas into sugar and carbohydrates.

 

ELECTRIC

Electric energy is to the kinetic energy of moving electrons, the negatively-charged particles in atoms. For more information about electricity, see Basics of Electricity.

 

 

 

 On this page, you can find energy information about the world’s most populated countries: China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Russia, and Japan. For fossil fuel information about any country, see online tables here.

A nation’s sources of energy hinge on so many factors, from what’s naturally available to geography, political history, and relative wealth.

Even though energy demand is increasing rapidly across the globe, the International Energy Agency estimates a fifth of the world population lacks access to electricity, and a whopping 40 percent of people still use traditional biomass – like wood chips – for cooking. People who live without the energy infrastructure of electricity depend on portable petroleum fuels, manure and methane gas produced from manure, wood, grass, and agricultural wastes. Because these sources of energy are informal, it’s difficult to track and include them in statistics.

World electricity and energy demands are escalating. Countries are expanding energy investment to non-fossil sources like biofuels, wind, solar, and geothermal. At the same time, they are competing to secure access to coal, natural gas, and petroleum both at home and abroad.

 

Nowhere has rapid energy growth been more conspicuous than in the world’s most populated country, China. While most countries saw moderate energy growth in the same period, this Asian nation doubled energy use in less than a decade – see graph – and surpassed the United States in total energy use in 2009, according to International Energy Agency estimates. Until 2009, the United States lead the world in total energy consumption, though not per person consumption, for decades. For a list of the top 30 countries by total energy consumption see here.

Meanwhile, less than 42 percent of people in Africa had electricity at home in 2009. South Asians seemed better off than Africans that year, at 62 percent, but the real story is much more diverse. Nearly 100 percent of Chinese had access to electricity, while in Burma, only 13 percent had access. Worldwide almost 78 percent of people had access to electricity in 2009, according to the International Energy Agency.

 

ENERGY IN THE WORLD’S MOST POPULATED COUNTRIES

 

CHINA (Pop. 1.3 billion)

Between 2008 and 2035, China may triple its electricity demand, adding power plant capacity equal to the current U.S. total, the International Energy Agency projects in one scenario of the 2010 World Energy Outlook.

China is the world’s most populated country and also the world’s largest energy consumer. China gets most of its energy from coal, 71 percent in 2008. China is also the world’s biggest coal producer but only third, behind the United States and Russia, in coal reserves.

In 2008, China generated another 19 percent of its energy from oil, which it imported from all over the world, more than half came collectively from Saudi Arabia, Angola, Iran, Oman, Russia, and Sudan. China used to export its oil, but by 2009 automobile investment was expanded by so much, the country became the second largest oil importer (United States is first).

China is in hot pursuit of securing as much oil as possible, as the nation’s reliance on imported oil is growing far more rapidly than its oil production. Several powerful, national oil companies provide the domestic oil, both from on and off-shore sources. Furthermore, China has purchased oil assets in the Middle East, Canada, and Latin America, and it also conducts oil-for-loan exchanges with other countries, $90 billion worth since 2009, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Only a small proportion of China’s energy comes natural gas, produced domestically and imported in liquified form, but that may change as prices lower and liquified natural gas terminals are constructed.

China is the world’s biggest user of hydroelectric power, which made up 6 percent of energy and 16 percent of electricity in 2009. The country’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, is expected to begin operating in 2012. Nuclear power accounts for only 1 percent of total consumption. However, China’s government predicts it will have seven times its current nuclear capacity by 2020.

Detailed data on energy in China can be found here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

INDIA (1.2 billion)

India is the world’s largest democracy. Though India’s population is close to that of China’s, it is only the world’s fifth largest energy user, behind the United States, China, Russia, and Japan.

Like China, India’s electricity comes mostly from coal. However, India doesn’t have enough electricity for everyone, and only 65 percent of the population has access to electricity.

Instead, many Indian use fuels at home for lighting and cooking. A 2004-2005 survey by the government found more than 40 percent of rural Indians used kerosene instead of electricity for home lighting. The same survey showed that for cooking, 74 percent of Indians used firewood and wood chips, 8.6 percent used liquified petroleum gas, 9 percent used dung cakes, and 1.3 percent used kerosene.

India produces oil domestically, but like China, the rate of India’s increasing oil consumption far outstrips its production. India therefore has to import oil; in 2009 its most significant sources were Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, Angola, and Venezuela, in descending order.

India doesn’t have the electricity capacity to serve its population but aims to add many thousands of megawatts in the near future.

Like China, India has nuclear power, with 14 nuclear plants in operation and another 10 in planning, the reactors purchased from France and Russia.

 

UNITED STATES (300 million)

Until China recently outpaced it, the United States was the biggest energy consumer in the world, though per capita use isn’t the highest but in the same range as several developed countries worldwide and less than the per capita use in Canada. The United States relies on petroleum, coal, and natural gas, as well as a small part nuclear, hydroelectric, and various non-fossil sources. The Unites States has significant oil, coal, and natural gas reserves, as well as the potential for significant investment in solar, off and on-shore wind, and biofuels.

The mix of fuels that provide electricity varies widely from region to region. Find a map of fuel mix by U.S. region from the Edison Electric Insitute here.

For more U.S. information:

-Fossil fuel use in the United States, go here.
-U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and energy here.
-U.S. sources of energy, see here.

 

INDONESIA (250 million)

Indonesia is an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands — 6,000 are inhabited — and it is home to 76 active volcanoes and a significant undeveloped geothermal capacity, estimated at 28 gigawatts, about as much total electricity capacity as Indonesia had in 2008.

Indonesia’s energy demand is growing rapidly, split between coal, natural gas, and petroleum sources. Traditional sources of energy like wood and agricultural waste continue to be used, particularly in rural areas and remote islands, and the International Energy Administration estimates these fuels provide about a quarter of the country’s energy.

Indonesia exports coal and natural gas. In the past, the country also exported more oil than it used, but as of 2004 that balance changed. By 2009, the country suspended its membership in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) because it was using so much of its own oil.

 

BRAZIL (200 million)

Tropical Brazil is the largest country in South America both in area and population, and it is the third largest user of energy in the Americas, after the United States and Canada.

Made from sugar cane, Brazil’s ethanol production is the world’s second largest, after the United States, which makes ethanol from corn.

Brazil produces almost as much petroleum as Venezuela and produces slightly more fuel than it consumes.

While Brazil depends on oil for other energy applications like transportation, the country gets an astounding 84 percent of electricity from hydroelectric dams. Brazil also has two nuclear power plants.

PAKISTAN (190 million)

Pakistan has limited access to electricity and energy sources, and its rural population still relies on gathered fuels like wood for heating and cooking.

In 2009 around 60 percent of the population had access to electricity, far better than its neighbor Afghanistan, at just 15 percent. Nonetheless, even with access, most of the population can’t rely on electricity unless they are wealthy enough to own generators. Pakistan suffers from lengthy blackouts, even in its cities, in part because of poor transmission infrastructure and widespread electricity theft. The situation is also aggravated by lack of capacity planning, insufficient fuel, and irregularities in water supply for hydroelectric.

In 2010, angry citizens protested violently after lengthy blackouts — as long as 18 hours according to Reuters — plagued the country. That summer, Pakistan has nowhere near enough electricity for its peak needs, which were roughly 25 percent more than its total production capacity. The widespread blackouts crippled the country’s textile industry, its biggest source of exports, and some reports suggest that hundreds of factories were shuttered as a result of sporadic power.

Meanwhile, several proposals for gas pipelines through Pakistan have yet to get solidified, including one from Iran to Afghanistan (which is opposed by the United States).

 

BANGLADESH (160 million)

Like nearby Pakistan and India, with which it shares cultural and political histories, Bangladesh also suffers from electricity shortages. Only 41 percent of Bangladeshis had access to electricity in 2009, according to the International Energy Administration.

Most of the electricity in this delta nation is generated from natural gas, with smaller amounts each from oil, coal, and hydroelectric sources. More than 30 percent of the country’s energy comes from biomass, agricultural wastes, and other combustible, renewable materials.

In 2011, Bangladesh signed a contract with oil company ConocoPhillips, allowing off-shore drilling for natural gas, despite internal protests that insisted Bangladesh should keep more of the gas for its own. The agreement gives 20 percent to Bangladesh.

 

NIGERIA (160 million)

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, and it is world famous for its oil, most of which is exported for sale by huge foreign oil companies like Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Petrobras, and Statoil. Roughly 65 percent of government revenue comes from the oil sector, and around 40 percent its oil exports are sent to the United States. Nigeria also holds the largest natural gas reserves in Africa.

Extensive oil development has wreaked havoc on Nigeria’s ecology. Oil spills have polluted Nigeria’s water, affecting both fishing and agriculture. Much of Nigeria’s natural gas is flared rather than being collected and sold for fuel. Flaring involves burning off naturally-occurring gases during petroleum drilling and refining, resulting in  environmental degradation, greenhouse gas emissions and loss of revenue.

Even though Nigeria is fossil fuel-rich, only 47 percent of the population have access to electricity, and less than a fifth of energy in that country came from petroleum and natural gas in 2007, reflecting the widespread use of more traditional fuels like wood. Nigeria only used 13 percent of petroleum it produced in 2009.

 

RUSSIA (140 million)

Russia has significant wealth in fossil fuels, including the largest natural gas reserves and the second largest coal reserves, after the United States. In 2009, Russia produced more oil even than Saudi Arabia, mostly from Western Siberia. In 2009, Russia exported far more oil than it used, and 81 percent of its exports went to Europe, notably the Netherlands and Germany.

Russia is also the third largest consumer of energy in the world.

The country has a well-developed pipeline system to transport oil from remote regions, a system which is almost entirely controlled by a single state-run company, Transneft.

Like Nigeria, Russia flares gas in the process of drilling and refining oil, and in 2008 Russia flared more gas than any other country in the world, 1,432 Bcf of natural gas, more than double Nigeria’s output and equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions for 1.4 million passenger cars, according the calculator on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website and data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Russia operates 31 nuclear reactors, half of which employ a similar design to the ill-fated Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine.

 

JAPAN (130 million)

Japan doesn’t have significant fossil fuel resources, one reason that much of its electricity industry relies on nuclear power. It is the world’s third largest user of nuclear power.

Japan is the world’s third larger oil consumer, and it does produce some oil domestically. However, it also imports a lot of oil and natural gas, the later in the form of liquified natural gas, or LNG. Almost half of its energy came from imported oil in 2009, and just 16 percent of Japanese energy came from a domestic source.

Japan also invests heavily in foreign oil, including in the United Arab Emirates, the Congo, Algeria, Russia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Canada, the United Kingdom, Vietnam, and Indonesia, to name a few.

As of June 2011, Japan is still recovering from a massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated its northeast coast on March 11, 2011, forcing the shutdown of several nuclear reactors as well as damaging refineries, oil and gas generators, and electricity transmission infrastructure.

Japan imports most of its oil from the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar together supplied 77 percent of imports in 2009.

There is no easy answer to what is the best source of energy or electricity. Is the priority reliability, affordability, the economy, international human rights, limiting greenhouse gas emissions, preserving environmental resources, or human health?

It’s undeniable that today — whether we like it or not — humans worldwide are overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. Everything eaten, worn, lived in, and bought is tied to availability of fossil fuels. Even if 100 percent of politicians were determined to stop using them today, society has neither the electricity grid nor the vehicular and industrial technology to sustain the current American lifestyle on non-fossil sources of energy. Yet.

When comparing sources of energy, it’s easy to forget how universal fossil fuels are. These sources continue to dominate for reasons that are difficult to measure, like political influence, advertising clout, and control over energy infrastructure. Other sources have disadvantages purely because they don’t fit in as well.

Volume brings another difficulty in comparing sources of energy. There is so much more fossil energy, and it’s been used for a long time, so we know a lot more about its hazards and benefits. More modern technologies are harder to quantify. Some are renewable but still pollute (biofuels), some are very clean except in accidents or waste disposal (nuclear). Most electricity sources (renewable or not) use steam turbines, and all the water to make steam has to come from somewhere, but how important should that factor be?

Clicking the graphic above will give an abbreviated chart comparing sources line by line, but that doesn’t provide anywhere close to the whole story.

Each of the following topics compares the major sources of energy  through a different lens. Though environmental and local issues may seem the most important to those of us who don’t own power plants or utility companies, the cost of energy drives which sources are actually in place today and which sources will see investment tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

In the early days of electricity, energy systems were small and localized. The Pearl Street Station in New York City, launched in 1882, was the first of these complete systems, connecting a 100-volt generator that burned coal to power a few hundred lamps in the neighborhood. Soon, many similar self-contained, isolated systems were built across the country.

During this era, two major types of systems developed: the AC and DC grids. Thomas Edison, who designed Pearl Street, was a proponent of direct current (DC). In a direct current, the electrons flow in a complete circuit, from the generator, through wires and devices, and back to the generator.

William Stanley, Jr. built the first generator that used alternating current (AC). Instead of electricity flowing in one direction, the flow switches its direction, back and forth. AC current is what is used almost exclusively worldwide today, but in the late 1800s it was nearly 10 years behind DC systems. AC has a major advantage in that it is possible to transmit AC power as high voltage and convert it to low voltage to serve individual users.

From the late 1800s onward, a patchwork of AC and DC grids cropped up across the country, in direct competition with one another. Small systems were consolidated throughout the early 1900s, and local and state governments began cobbling together regulations and regulatory groups. However, even with regulations, some businessmen found ways to create elaborate and powerful monopolies. Public outrage at the subsequent costs came to a head during the Great Depression and sparked Federal regulations, as well as projects to provide electricity to rural areas, through the Tennessee Valley Authority and others.

By the 1930s regulated electric utilities became well-established, providing all three major aspects of electricity, the power plants, transmission lines, and distribution. This type of electricity system, a regulated monopoly, is called a vertically-integrated utility. Bigger transmission lines and more remote power plants were built, and transmission systems became significantly larger, crossing many miles of land and even state lines.

As electricity became more widespread, larger plants were constructed to provide more electricity, and bigger transmission lines were used to transmit electricity from farther away. In 1978 the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act was passed, making it possible for power plants owned by non-utilities to sell electricity too, opening the door to privatization.

By the 1990s, the Federal government was completely in support of opening access to the electricity grid to everyone, not only the vertically-integrated utilities. The vertically-integrated utilities didn’t want competition and found ways to prevent outsiders from using their transmission lines, so the government stepped in and created rules to force open access to the lines, and set the stage for Independent System Operators, not-for-profit entities that managed the transmission of electricity in different regions.

Today’s electricity grid – actually three separate grids – is extraordinarily complex as a result. From the very beginning of electricity in America, systems were varied and regionally-adapted, and it is no different today. Some states have their own independent electricity grid operators, like California and Texas. Other states are part of regional operators, like the Midwest Independent System Operator or the New England Independent System Operator. Not all regions use a system operator, and there are still thousands TK of municipalities that provide all aspects of electricity.

Who has the authority over transmission is also equally convoluted. Individual states control some aspects of the lines on their soil, but the rules are implemented by the operators. And others are managed by the North American Reliability Council, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the Department of Energy.

In today’s market, some states are deregulated and some are not. Even in non-deregulated states, different companies own the power plants and the utilities to which you write your monthly checks.

 

For details about how electricity gets to you today, see Power Grid Technology and the Smart Grid.

For more information about how electricity is bought and sold, see the Electricity Marketplace.