Lessons from Livermore's 2023 Energy Consumption Chart

Lesson 1: don't get buried in the detail and look at the big pictures.

It’s that time of year when the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) releases its estimated energy consumption chart for the previous year and when I do my annual examination of the entrails to see what is happening and what has changed.

Superficially, not much has changed since last year, although things appear to be going in the right direction, with overall energy consumption down from 94.7 quads to 93.6. A quad is a quadrillion BTUs or British Thermal Units, a measure of the heat content of fuels or energy sources. For metric types, one quad equals approximately 1.055 Exajoules.

But where I used to get excited about every tenth of a quad reduction, I am being more restrained this year. When I wrote Lessons from Livermore's 2022 Energy Consumption Chart, the chart showed consumption of 100.3 quads as their estimate; the final version shown above shows 2022 at 94.7, a major downward revision. Perhaps we should be looking at the big picture instead of the fine detail.

The most important big picture in the LLNL chart is its representation of “energy services” as opposed to “rejected energy.” LLNL used to call energy services “useful energy,” which I think is more accurate. I am not sure about “rejected energy” either, because it is not rejected; it is the cost of doing business in a heat engine.

Take the car, where controlled explosions of gasoline are turned into rotary motion to push 3-ton mobile living rooms carrying 200 pounds of human; 80% of the energy is lost as heat, but it’s not “rejected”; it is doing its job, albeit very inefficiently. That is how heat engines work; see Allison Bailes’ explanation of the Carnot efficiency. Making electricity is slightly more efficient than moving cars, but it also bumps up against Carnot. We can’t efficiency our way out of Carnot; we have to switch to systems that don’t rely on burning fossil fuels to run heat engines.

Getting rid of fossil fuels and heat engines doesn’t sound nearly so daunting of a problem when you understand what Jan Rosenow calls the “primary energy fallacy,” the belief that we have to replace all of the quads of fossil fuel heat. We don’t! Looking at the 2023 numbers, we need 32.1 quads of useful energy; we get 11.43 quads from renewable and zero-carbon sources. Finding 20.6 quads of additional zero-carbon energy is doable, with more renewables and nukes, but also with better grids and HVDC interconnections that can move solar and wind energy around the world, (in California alone, 2.3 million megawatt-hours (MWh) of wind and solar energy were curtailed, or wasted because it couldn’t be utilized in 2023.) And of course, we could also reduce demand with efficiency and sufficiency and reduce that 20.6 quads significantly.

(I wrote about this in my book, the Story of Upfront Carbon, you can read an exerpt here)

One source of energy that I never noticed before down at the bottom is Biomass. It’s huge at 5 quads, bigger than all our renewables put together and almost as big as nuclear. The Energy Information Administration estimates In 2023, biomass accounted for about 5% of U.S. energy consumption, or about 4,978 trillion British thermal units (TBtu).

The EIA classes it as “renewable energy” because it comes from plants, but the bulk of it is biofuels like ethanol that are mixed into gasoline and probably take as much energy to make as you get out of it. Other biomass includes wood and wood waste, municipal solid waste, and sewage. These all produce more CO2 per kW/hr of power generated than burning coal.

Adding this to the renewable and zero-carbon sources would pump up the numbers, but biogenic CO2 is still CO2, the atmosphere doesn’t know the difference. We have to replace this with true renewables as well.

Looking at the big picture over time can be a bit depressing; over ten years, the needles have hardly moved. Coal use is half of what it was so CO2 emissions will be lower. Total useful energy consumption is way down by six quads, primarily due to changes in the industrial sector.

The economy grew significantly in the ten years, but total energy use is down. This is very good. But given how much we have to do in such a short time, it is just not good enough.

NOTE: I am turning off comments. I do not want to talk to anyone today.