[SGVLUG] Off-topic - US govt energy site - interesting statistics

[David Lawyer]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 06:12:07PM -0500, Robert Leyva wrote:
> I thought this might be fun to share, the United States Energy Information
> website
> 
> http://www.eia.doe.gov/
> 
> Information on historical usages of petroleum, electricity, and such.

While the EIA has some significant data, I can't seem to find some of
the most important data using this "homepage" url.  One important item
is the thermal efficiency of generation electricity from fuel,
expressed as an inverse of efficiency in BTU/kwh and known at the
"heat rate".  In 1960 it was about 10,760 BTU/kwh and today it's not
much better (10,400 +- BTU/kwh).  That's 45 years of stagnation in
improving energy efficiency.  One reason: save $ on capital
investment.

See this from doe (Dept. of Energy); I guess EIA doesn't think this
information is important, so they exclude it.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb1306.html
heat-rates EIA 1949-2006

Another problem.  It should go back to about 1900.  There were some
statistics collected then but they need work (they were only collected
then at 5 year intervals and other factors muddle the data such as
streetcar companies generating electricity and selling it to
residences).  But this old data does enable a rough estimation of
pounds of coal per kwh.  See "Energy Sources ..." by Eugene Ayres,
McGraw Hill, 1952, p.139 Fig.1.  

You might think you could find this reference on Google's book search,
but this book hasn't been scanned.  Even if it was online, you
wouldn't find "heat rates" and a related term "fuel rate" is part a a
figure which might be part of a graphic display.  Even though years
are part of the figure, searching on 1900 would result in nothing
since the figure starts with 1902 (due to the Census of Industries
being done in that year).  So there is still a need for libraries with
old books for doing research (and not the libraries like UCLA that
have put their old books in storage).  Caltech is one that has their
old books still in the stacks.

The old data is very important since it shows efficiency of
electricity generation improved about 6 fold from 1902-1950 but
improvement came to nearly a halt around 1960.  EIA just has no sense
of history.  This data also implies how energy-inefficient the old
electric streetcars were in the 1890's before the automobile.

Some of this stuff is on my website as it relates to the
energy-efficiency of transportation:  www.lafn.org/~dave I've got a
lot of work to do on my research for the site but have been spending
little time at it after my wife came down with cancer and I've had
health problems of lesser significance.

Also since the current heat rate implies about 33% efficiency and
since about 10% is lost in transmission, electric energy efficiency is
about 30% (excluding electric motor efficiency), the same as a
gasoline auto engine at optimal operating points.

			David Lawyer