Thinking about the threads I posted about energy the other day. I knew that electric engines were far more efficient than even the latest combustion engines. But until I read Thorn's article on rewired.nz, I'd never joined the dots that this means we don't need the same number of calories of renewable energy to replace fossil fuel energy.
(1/?)
This is huge! We need to start quoting energy stats with this factored in.
Eg instead of talking about total calories (or whatever the metric) an energy source supplies, we need to talk about the calories of work supplied.
(2/?)
Making up an example, let's say combustion engines in Aotearoa used just shy of a million calories of fossil fuel energy last year. Let's be generous, and divide it by a third instead of quartering it. So that's 333,333 calories of work supplied. It helps the facile fuel industry to say that we need a million calories of renewables to replace their fuels. Instead, we report the figure for the work done.
(3/?)
Then, we also report the calories of work done by renewable electricity that year. The number is a bit lower than for total calories supplied, which might seem like it's underselling it. But when you put it side by side with the number for the work supplied by fossil fuels, it's a higher proportion, and much closer to comparing apples with apples.
(4/?)
Take this piece of industry-funded reputation laundering for example;
"40% of our energy comes from renewable sources ... 60% of our energy still comes from fossil fuels."
https://www.energymix.co.nz/our-consumption/new-zealands-consumption/
Total energy supplied, yes. But let's look at total work done.
(5/?)
That industry-funded page also says that total energy use in Aotearoa consumes 599PJ (petajoules) a year. So that's roughly 360PJ of fossil energy. Divide that by 3, now it's 120PJ supplied.
I'm don't know exactly what the losses are on that 240PJ from renewables. But again, let's be generous and chop a third off, so 160PJ supplied.
See how that changes the picture? Now we see that renewables are actually more than half of our energy mix. A bit of good news in these trying times.
(6/6)
Also, don’t forget the incredible journey that fossil fuels go on to get from the drill hole to your vehicle.
If we take into account the energy costs of cracking, distilling, chilling, piping, fueling, transporting by ship, decanting, transporting by truck, and then putting into your car it’s a similarly large percentage.
If we stopped using fossil fuels some huge percentage, maybe 30%, maybe more than half, of all shipping would stop. No longer needed. And the trucks on our roads.
This is a bonfire demo instance for testing purposes
