Sidebars and stuff to the main post. Here we examine some of the "fudginess" in renewables reporting by the US EIA. Long story short, we're consuming less from renewables than it may appear.
They are doing it similarly to how I have calculated the corrections above, and so I think deserves an honest stamp of approval 👍. They have actually estimated a lower quality of steam from geothermal electricity generation than the assumptions I have used above (10% vs 38%), which I didn't know about. Also, the IEA is helpful in splitting Biomass from Non-combustible Renewable sources as I have done above. It helps you understand the real gap in carbon-free energy production. I took a quick look at Sweden (for you 😊 ), and unfortunately while the "renewables" number is large (54% reported by sweden.se), biomass constitutes the majority of it (https://www.iea.org/countries/sweden). Sweden does produce a lot less CO2 emissions per capita, but it is most likely due to the high usage of nuclear and a decent amount of hydro.
Thanks for asking this question! I'm glad the IEA is taking clear efforts to report accurately.
Yes Sweden is lucky to have lots of hydro, without which we wouldn't be as much of a sustainability poster child... The one thing that Sweden has going for it is that we decarbonized heating early on + houses are well insulated. Heat pumps and district heating are very widespread; gas and oil boilers quite are rare.
There is still a widespread belief in biofuel here. Currently it comes from food waste and forestry waste products - and (unfortunately) lots of imported biomass from South East Asia, which doesn't make much sense.
Wow. Is it just the EIA that does this misleading conversion or have you seen it show up in other statistics too?
I had only looked into the EIA documentation when I was writing the main post, but I just looked into the easily-mistaken IEA (the International Energy Agency) documentation and you can find their methodologies on page 248 here under "Primary Energy Conventions": https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/4f314df4-8c60-4e48-9f36-bfea3d2b7fd5/WorldBAL_2020_Documentation.pdf
They are doing it similarly to how I have calculated the corrections above, and so I think deserves an honest stamp of approval 👍. They have actually estimated a lower quality of steam from geothermal electricity generation than the assumptions I have used above (10% vs 38%), which I didn't know about. Also, the IEA is helpful in splitting Biomass from Non-combustible Renewable sources as I have done above. It helps you understand the real gap in carbon-free energy production. I took a quick look at Sweden (for you 😊 ), and unfortunately while the "renewables" number is large (54% reported by sweden.se), biomass constitutes the majority of it (https://www.iea.org/countries/sweden). Sweden does produce a lot less CO2 emissions per capita, but it is most likely due to the high usage of nuclear and a decent amount of hydro.
Thanks for asking this question! I'm glad the IEA is taking clear efforts to report accurately.
Awesome, thank you!
Yes Sweden is lucky to have lots of hydro, without which we wouldn't be as much of a sustainability poster child... The one thing that Sweden has going for it is that we decarbonized heating early on + houses are well insulated. Heat pumps and district heating are very widespread; gas and oil boilers quite are rare.
There is still a widespread belief in biofuel here. Currently it comes from food waste and forestry waste products - and (unfortunately) lots of imported biomass from South East Asia, which doesn't make much sense.