Renewable energy potential

Color the difference between the United States’ energy consumed, energy produced by renewable energy, and potential energy produced by renewable energy

Data sources

For U.S. primary energy consumption estimates by source: Annual Energy Review. Accessed December 2016. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). This data contains:

• Annual estimates of production and consumption of energy totals and by source
• Sources include fossil fuels, renewable energy, and nuclear electric power
• Estimates in Quadrillion BTU
• Covers 1949 to 2015

For U.S. renewable energy technical potential estimates: United States Renewable Energy Technical Potential. 2012. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). This data contains:

• Generation and capacity technical potentials of a number of renewable energy technologies
• Technologies include solar PV, concentrated solar power, wind, biofuels, hydrothermal, geothermal, and hydropower
• Estimates in terawatt-hours (generation) and gigawatts (capacity)

How the data was used

• The Total Primary Energy Consumption value (97.343568 quadrillion BTUs) was taken from the EIA’s Annual Energy Review for 2015
• The Total Renewable Energy Production value (9.465968 quadrillion BTUs) was also taken from the EIA’s Annual Energy Review for 2015
• The Renewable Energy Technology Technical Generation Potential values (totaling 381,800 terawatt-hours) were taken from the NREL’s Renewable Energy Technical Potential data sheet.
• Quadrillion BTUs were converted to Trillion BTUs by multiplying by 1,000 (97,344 and 9,466 trillion BTUs for total consumption and renewable energy production values)
• 381,800 terawatt-hours was converted into trillion BTUs by multiplying by 3.412141633 equals 1,302,755 trillion BTUs
• The 1,302,755, 97,344 and 9,466 figures were then used to create circles whose relative areas correspond to the energy values

Code

A python script is available in the code repository to generate or extend this activity, and can be run like this:

python re_technical.py

Which will create an svg file with the three circles drawn based on the energy data described above.