This chart distresses me: solar at 0.9 is only about a third of petroleum at 36. It is making it look like new renewable (ie non-hyrdo) are a lot more sizeable than they really are. From Lawrence Livermore this is hard to swallow. If the boxes sizes are on a weird logarithmic scale, then this should be explicit in the legend.
That's the 2018 one by 2021, it hit 1.5. And you forget this is the entire US energy economy; not just electricity.
Also, only about a third of that petroleum input is useful (worse in transport, about a quarter). So, that would be about a 12. Add wind, hydro, and nuclear to the mix and it's basically a 50-50 split in terms of useful output of oil vs. renewables. Of course most of that goes into electricity generation. But luckily there's a major transition from ice to evs under way. So, that will eat into petroleum usage quickly.
If you look at the useful energy component, the transition to renewables is a lot further than many people think. Everybody keeps comparing the raw produced energy. The only thing that matters is the useful part of that.
You are eagerly reading an agenda into what is probably just an artifact of the plotting software intended to make the plot easier to read. Hanlon’s razor applies here.
