Energy Waste
When you’re the most powerful country in the world, everybody would want to keep track of the amount of energy you consume each year. And as expected, the US consumes more energy than more than half of the countries in this planet combined. It really wouldn’t be shocking since it needs to power billions of people and show the rest of the world that it’s still dominating the charts in different fields.
In this graphic provided by Visual Capitalist, it shows the estimated total energy consumption of the country last year. Called the Sankey diagram, it shows where the energy’s source comes from and where it goes: to the residential, commercial. industrial and transportation sectors. The information used was provided by the Department of Energy and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
So how much exactly did the US used last year?
Source: Visual Capitalist
Energy Waste Statistics
According to the sources, the country consumed around 97.5 quads of energy! That means 97.5 quadrillion BTUs! Still can’t get the picture of how much energy that is? Just imagine this. 97.5 quads is approximately around:
252,000,000 tonnes of TNT
36,000,000 tonnes of coal
8,007,000,000 gallons (US) of gasoline
970,434,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas
13.3 tonnes of uranium-235
25,200,000 tonnes of oil
293,071,000,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh)
Green Energy
While that may be a lot for the whole world to handle, sadly, most of that energy is wasted (as you can see in the diagram). Out of the 97.5 quads of energy used, 60.6% of that amount is rejected or not used effectively. This is something people from the energy sector can work on to improve its efficiency.
The diagram also shows that the country still has a long way to go before it can consider itself a “green” country. Only 0.532 quad of energy come from the sun while only 1.82 quads come from the wind. Hopefully, the most powerful country on Earth will increase its green energy consumption as the years go by.
