Energy consumption: are we getting safer or causing further damage?
As the United States continues to evolve technologically, we must account for the environment and for safe methods of both energy production and consumption. Energy and electricity are essential to the United States, and without them, as seen in various cases such as the Texas winter blackouts, we cannot function. Over the past decades, the United States has set up a complex, efficient electricity grid infrastructure that utilizes a variety of forms of electricity generation.
In order to meet the ever-changing electricity needs of citizens, companies, and more throughout the United States, a load system has been put in place. Basically, the more electricity that is demanded, the more power plants and generators we fire up. Generally, we tend to firstly utilize large-scale plants that have a high yield, such as nuclear and fossil fuel plants. If more electricity is needed, then lower-scale plants like hydroelectric and solar are fired up. Over the past two decades, we’ve recognized that coal and fossil fuel power plants produce a large amount of polluting emissions which we must limit in order to function environmentally. But how much has the United States acted on reducing these emissions? Today, I’m here to review an in-depth analysis of the past 45+ years of energy consumption, aiming to show how the United States is shifting its energy consumption and production with aim of a healthy environment.
In order to analyze this shift in energy consumption, I firstly needed to acquire and clean a large amount of data. To do this, I acquired United States energy consumption data from the World Bank Databank, specifically looking at the percent makeup of our main production methods out of our total energy consumption. These main categories of generation include coal, nuclear, natural gas, oil, hydroelectric, and renewables, including solar and wind. It is important to note that the renewables category does not include hydroelectric, so I chose to keep the two separated (although hydroelectric could be considered as a renewable). After acquiring all of my data, I did a TON of cleaning and organizing until I was left with a single DataFrame, with energy consumption percent values for each energy category, for each year from 1972–2015. 2015 was the newest set of data available, so my analysis stretches until then.
In order to see some general trends across our energy consumption, I plotted all six categories as a percent makeup of total energy consumption across all years of data. You can see this distribution in Figure 1 above. Visually, the first thing I noticed was our overall shift in priority from coal generation to natural gas. You can see that until around 1988, coal was the United State’s main priority and source of energy. As time shifted into the 2000s, the United States began to disassemble coal plants and put a lot more funding into natural gas generation. As we disassembled coal plants, we tended to build natural gas ones. Another visual trend apparent in Figure 1 shows our decrease in priority for oil generation. Across the entirety of the timeline, our oil-based energy consumption decreased, ending at 0.9% of our total energy production in 2015, a 14.94% decrease from oil energy production in 1972. In order to more closely analyze some of these trends, it is important to isolate specific chunks of time.
Although a similar distribution of data, Figure 2 zooms in on the percent distribution of total United States energy consumption, only displaying the most recent data from 2000–2015. Up until 2000, we saw a surge in coal and nuclear generation, with a rise in natural gas generation in the late 1900s. In Figure 2 below, you can see that described shift from coal to natural gas, as well as a general balance in both nuclear and hydroelectric generation. It is very important to note that similarly to the relationship between coal and natural gas generation, as we disassembled oil plants we began to develop more renewable energy plants. Although the shift doesn’t look too large visually, from 2000–2015 alone the amount of renewable energy generation that made up our total energy consumption increased by 5.5%. We are likely making up for the shift away from polluting generation, mainly through natural gas plants but also through this spike in renewable energy.
Overall, from 1972–2015, the United States has clearly made some effort to reduce energy production-based pollution through the means by which our electricity is generated for consumption. Given that from 1972–2015, coal and oil energy consumption lowered by about 15% each, and renewable energy consumption increased by about 7.3%, I can confidently say that we are moving in the right direction regarding energy generation-based pollution. It is essential that we continue to shift towards renewables and continue to replace high-emission systems with these newer models, especially if we want our future generations to have a safe place to live.
