Digging into the Sankey diagrams of US Energy Flow.

If you haven’t seen them yet, go check out the Sankey diagrams from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory showing how the US produces and consumes energy. It’s super interesting. I decided to dig a bit and produced this cool (in my mind, at least) chart showing how the US economy has actually gotten more efficient over time - even as real GDP as increased (along with the population), total energy production has stayed more or less the same.

energy vs GDP chart.jpg

You can download the data here. Solar and wind don’t play a huge role right now, but solar’s share has 10x’ed over the past decade, and wind’s has 3x’ed. Coal’s has basically halved, thanks to cheap natural gas. There’s a lot of work to do - and this is only for a (large) share of the US’ emissions.