alt Hacker News> a holy grail of energy production
Since you're comparing it to nuclear, I'm assuming you mean electricity production here, not energy production?
It's always worth remembering that electricity only accounts for ~20% of global energy consumption (in the US it's closer to 33%).
I suspect people confuse these two because in a residential context electricity plays a huge part of our energy usage, but as a whole it's a smaller part of total energy usage than most people imagine.
But any serious discussion of renewable energy should be careful not to make this very significant error.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory publishes a great diagram of US energy use: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2024-12/e...
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At home I use 15,000kWh of oil for heating each year (about 10kWh per litre, 1500 litres), and 8,000kWh of electricity (we use a lot more than the average household). For driving that's another 5000kWh a year if at 4 miles per kWh.
So even in a residential context, electricity is only about 1/4 of the demand. Across the whole country it's less than 300TWh out of 1500TWh, under 20%.
That excludes "imported energy" though, as in goods which used energy to make but were then imported.
What does "Rejected Energy" mean in that graph?
Great chart, by the way.