Thread by @homemadeguitars

I've had this other story about my current favorite graphic I wanted to tell, and I'm done with my day's obligations, so...

The most common question, or expressed confusion, I get about this graphic is the waste energy. Like, howcum? Is this best we can do?
Out of 100.2 units of energy, we piss away 67.5 and only get use of 32.7?
WHY???
Coz physics.
It's a damn shame,too.

2. What's weird is, you already know this, and you know why. It's hiding in plain sight.
Do you own, or have you ever been exposed to, a car, or a lawnmower?
Let's start with the car.
Unless is was a particular oddball, it had a radiator.
Why?
To reject energy.
That's it.

3. A car can't turn all the heat that's available by burning petroleum into motion. It can't even come close.
The heat that heats up your radiator is rejected energy.
The heat that comes out your tailpipe is rejected energy.
The noise your car makes is rejected energy.

4. The reason you can't open the hood and grab the exhaust manifold is rejected energy.
There is some certain quantity of energy, in the form of chemical energy, in gasoline. The way we make use of this energy is by converting it to heat. We burn the gasoline. Moves the energy.

5. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. First law of thermodynamics. But it can be converted from form to form. It can be applied to matter which the energy must move, and in the process entropy increases, and some energy becomes unavailable to do more work. Still energy.

6. The chemical energy in the petroleum arrived on Earth as solar energy. The process we call photosynthesis used that energy to bind together molecules of (mostly) carbon and hydrogen, and in the process of doing that work the energy became tangled up in the molecules.

7. So all this vast quantity of solar energy accumulated inside Earth, below the steadily accreting surface, as life worked its magic. It couldn't do any work, it couldn't dissipate through matter, because it was bound up connecting atoms together into molecules.

8. Some knothead figured out that by applying a burst of energy to this stuff, he could set off a reaction in which oxygen broke apart the molecules, and the energy leaked out as heat.
Katie, bar the door.
So, we know one part of that story. The oxygen atoms hooked to the carbon,

9. And Presto Changeo! Hurricane Ida!
And steel. Fiberglass. Concrete. Speed. Speed. Speed.
SPEED! SPEED! SPEEDSPEEDSPEED!!!
The joy of speed.

10. But.
By itself burning oil doesn't make things move. It just stinks. People had to figure out some other stuff.
I often hear what came next described as "human nature," but...
We figured out how to make heat engines twice. First time we wrote it down and forgot about it.

50 CE (50 AD)

12. But that's neither here nor there.
The only way we know to get significant motion from the chemical energy in petroleum is by using one of a family of machines called heat engines.
No other way that we've ever figured out.
From the original steam engine, up through

13. the vast majority of our electricity "generation" (including nuclear), jet planes and automobiles, semi trailer trucks and lawnmowers, if it burns fuel to go it's got a heat engine.
And heat engines have an absolute maximum possible efficiency above which they cannot go.

14. The principles which cause heat engines to produce motion absolutely cannot, under any circumstances ever anywhere, convert all the heat to motion.
It just doesn't work. There has to be some left over. Some leaks out. The heat of your tailpipe is leftover heat, and it has 2B.

15. It is not the case that wicked capitalists are wasting all this fuel just to make the climate change and themselves rich.
It is pretty much a fact that America's cars and power plants are absolutely as fuel and energy efficient as anybody can figure out how to make them.

16. The reason so much of a new car is plastic is for fuel efficiency.
A modern, fuel injected, computer controlled, multi sensor equipped, small passenger car or small SUV, is about as fuel efficient as can be under the laws of physics. The biggest single variable is the driver.

17. Every time you use your brakes to slow, you are specifically rejecting unused energy into the atmosphere.
You pushed down your gas pedal, fuel burned, heat resulted, the largest possible portion of that heat (between ¼ and just over ⅓) was converted to kinetic energy, speed,

18. and when you push the brake pedal down, sintered metallic brake pads press on cast iron disks, creating friction, which converts your kinetic energy back into heat energy, which is then dissipated into the atmosphere, heating it, rejected energy.
The faster you were going

19. when the need to slow arose, the more kinetic energy your car and your body contained, all having already traveled from solar energy to chemical energy to heat energy to kinetic energy, had to be converted back into heat energy, from whence we lose its trail.
But it's there.

20. Let's return to our graphic.
How does this work?
Start with the pink boxes.
The pink boxes are all the things we do with energy. They are all the things we do with our lives.

21. The pink boxes are
🔸Residential
🔸Commercial
🔸Industrial
🔸Transportation
We spend all our lives at home, at places of business, at places of work, or traveling between them.
At all stages of our life we engage with energy, drawing it in, causing action, sending it on.

22. Used to be, all the energy humans interacted with came from food, or directly from sunlight. Sunlight makes wind and drives the sailing ships. Sunlight heats bodies and dwellings. Sunlight is captured in plants and animals.
We move our bodies on the energy from our food.

23. If we have animals to help us, carry our burdens, pull our transportation or our implements, they are burning food for energy.
Once we figured out we could burn petroleum for light we were out of the range of food energy. Coal heat took us past food energy.

24. But once we figured out how to harness concentrated energy, concentrated sunlight in the corpses of untold millions and billions of long-dead high level solar energy converters, we got crazy.
So: pink boxes.

25. It is common to speak of energy consumption, but energy is never consumed. It passes through. So the only accurate term is throughput. Lines come into the pink boxes from their left, and leave to their right. Energy flows the whole way.

26. This graphic explains the sources and destinations of 100.2 "Quads" of energy. To be honest, I don't know what a quad is - four something. Quadrillion killowatt-hours? I don't know. Don't even care. Bunches. Lots.
But - it's a handy number. Ignore the point-two, and think %

26. You've got 100(.2) going through. You can use every number as the percent of the total, and only be off by two-tenths of one out of the hundred. This is not close enough to hit Mars from here, but almost.

27. So for instance, you can see there that of our total energy supply in 2019, roughly ten percent was coal to generate electricity. Another 11% of our total energy appetite was natural gas to generate electricity, and another 8½% was nuclear energy to generate electricity.

28. Solar energy is about a half a percent of our total energy, and wind another 2¾%. About a third of our total energy goes to generate electricity - well, 37% - of which roughly ⅔ is fossil fuels.
And, of all the energy we put in to generate electricity, ⅔ goes out as hot air

29. It's a river, running from left to right. The pink boxes are us. We're standing in the Missouri River with our mouths open. A little bit flows in and through. Most of it goes right around us, misses us completely and heads on downstream.
And we can't fix that. It's reality.

30. Look at the right edges of the pink boxes.
We make pretty good use of the energy in our houses. More dark gray than light, more use than rejection.
Commerce is decent too.
Manufacturing is about half and half. Too many moving parts. Motion means heat engines means waste.

31. Transportation is a mess. It's all heat engines. They cannot be made efficient.
"Aha!" I hear you say. "Electric cars!"
Ah, but look at the orange box.
We make electricity with heat engines. Of the 37% of total energy we spend generating electricity, 30% of the total runs

32. Heat engines.
81% of our electricity is generated by heat engines. And we're not even charging electric cars with it.
It's an interesting picture, I think.
G'nite