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owenversteegtoday at 5:44 PM1 replyview on HN

The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12% of the total for the EU and 7.8% for Europe.

For that, you want this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc.

You can see that this the gain in renewables in the EU has been mainly at the expense of coal (down >50% as a share of total energy use in 10 years), gas (down 4%), and nuclear (down 20%.) Oil use as a share of the total is up by 5%.


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eigenspacetoday at 5:55 PM

It can be rather misleading to to talk about renewable energy generation versus total energy usage.

Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation).

Another large quantity of energy-usage is heating, and electrical heat-pumps can be around 3-5x more energy efficient at heating an enclosed space than combustion or resistive heating.

So while things like heating an transportation use a very large amount of energy, conquering them with renewables actually won't require that Europe installs 10x or whatever more wind and solar, since electrification also brings significant new efficiencies.

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If you want to compare renewables against the amount of fossil fuels being burnt, then it'd be a lot more representative if you calculate the amount of wind energy impacting a wind turbine blade, or the amount of energy in solar radiation incident on a solar panel. That's an easy way to inflate the renewable numbers by ~5x or whatever

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