What Is the Most Efficient Source of Electricity? [View all]

[NickB79]

http://blogs.wsj.com/numbers/what-is-the-most-efficient-source-of-electricity-1754/#?mod=wsj_valettop_email

The true cost of electricity is difficult to pin down. That’s because a number of inputs comprise it: the cost of fuel itself, the cost of production, as well as the cost of dealing with the damage that fuel does to the environment.

Energy Points, a company that does energy analysis for business, factors in the these myriad values in terms of what percentage of the energy input—fossil fuel energy, plus energy for production and energy for environmental mitigation—will become usable electricity.

The chart above shows that fossil fuels yield, on a national average, only a portion of their original energy when converted into electricity. That’s because they are fossil fuels that require other fossil fuels to make the conversion into electricity; their emissions, such as carbon dioxide, also require a lot of energy to be mitigated. Renewables, however, have energy sources that aren’t fossil fuel and their only other energy inputs are production and mitigating the waste from that production. That actually results in more energy produced than fossil fuels put in. Wind, the most efficient fuel for electricity, creates 1164% of its original energy inputs when converted into electricity; on the other end of the efficiency spectrum, coal retains just 29% of its original energy.

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Energy Points’ methodology measures environmental externalities and calculates the energy it takes to mitigate them. For example, it quantifies the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that result from turning coal and natural gas into electricity and then calculates the energy it would take to mitigate those emissions through carbon capture and sequestration. Water scarcity and contamination are quantified as the energy that is required to durably supply water to that area. And in the case of solar or wind energy, Energy Points incorporates the life cycle impact of manufacturing and shipping the panels.