How Has U.S. Vitality Use Modified Since 1776?

In 2024, the USA consumed about 94 quadrillion British thermal items (quads) of vitality, a 1% improve from 2023, in keeping with our Month-to-month Vitality Assessment. Fossil fuels—petroleum, pure gasoline, and coal—accounted for 82% of complete U.S. vitality consumption in 2024. Nonfossil gasoline vitality—from renewables and nuclear vitality—accounted for the opposite 18%. Petroleum remained the most-consumed gasoline in the USA, because it has been for the previous 75 years, and nuclear vitality consumption exceeded coal consumption for the primary time ever.

When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, wooden, a renewable vitality supply, was the biggest supply of vitality in the USA. Used for heating, cooking, and lighting, wooden remained the biggest U.S. vitality supply till the late 1800s, when coal consumption grew to become extra frequent. Wooden vitality remains to be consumed, primarily by industrial lumber and paper crops that burn extra wooden waste to generate electrical energy.

Coal was the biggest supply of U.S. vitality for about 65 years, from 1885 till 1950. Early makes use of of coal included many functions which are not frequent, corresponding to in stoves for house heating and in engines for trains and ships. For the reason that Nineteen Sixties, almost all coal consumed in the USA has been for electrical energy era.

Petroleum has been the most-consumed supply of vitality in the USA since 1950. Petroleum merchandise corresponding to motor gasoline, diesel, jet gasoline, and propane are generally used throughout all sectors of the U.S. economic system, from transportation to industrial chemical substances and plastics.

Pure gasoline is the second-largest supply of U.S. vitality consumption, because it has been most years because it surpassed coal in 1958. Pure gasoline was as soon as thought of a waste byproduct of crude oil manufacturing however now has turn into a typical vitality supply for heating and electrical energy era.

Early use of water to energy grist, lumber, and different milling operations shouldn’t be effectively quantified and never included in our knowledge, however such mills have been frequent all through early U.S. historical past. The primary industrial use of hydropower to generate electrical energy in the USA was to energy lamps at a chair manufacturing unit in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1880. The world’s first hydroelectric energy plant to promote electrical energy to the general public opened on the Fox River close to Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1882.

Different types of renewable vitality didn’t turn into vital contributors to U.S. vitality manufacturing till extra not too long ago. In 2016, biofuels—together with the gasoline ethanol combined in motor gasoline—grew to become the most-consumed U.S. renewable vitality supply.

Electrical energy era from some zero-carbon sources, corresponding to wind and photo voltaic, has elevated quickly lately, whereas era from others, corresponding to hydropower and nuclear, has remained comparatively flat. In 2022, U.S. vitality consumption from renewable sources surpassed nuclear vitality for the primary time since 1984, and in 2023, renewables surpassed coal for the primary time since across the early Eighteen Eighties. America now consumes extra vitality from wind and photo voltaic sources individually than from hydropower.

To check totally different types of vitality, we convert to frequent items of warmth, referred to as British thermal items. Appendix A of our Month-to-month Vitality Assessment has the conversion elements that we use for every vitality supply, and Appendix E explains how we convert noncombustible renewable vitality sources.

Principal contributor: Mickey Francis. Article first revealed on Immediately in Vitality.