If one wishes to assess the effectiveness of electricity-generation methods, one first has to know how much electrical energy is needed in the first place. This is post, I will focus on the EU27 . The EU fortunately is very willing to openly share its statistics on many things, which means that numbers are readily available. Lots of tables can be found here, where the table on
final energy consumption of electricity is most interesting for our purposes.
In short, the EU27 has an annual energy consumption of slightly less than 246 million toe (2008), which (taken one of the various definitions, as 42 GJ per toe), pretty much comes down to 1e+19 Joules. This amount of course is not evenly distributed over the year, and there is also a large variation depending on the time of day. The total gross electricity generation in the EU27 is 3.37 TWh (2008), which comes down to about 1.2e+19 Joules. The ~20% difference between net consumption and gross production can be attributed to energy use by the plants themselves, and transport losses. At any rate, it is the gross number that we need to produce to cover Europe's electricity needs.
The electricity is currently generated by the following methods (2008):
- Nuclear: 937236 TWh (27.8% of total)
- Natural gas: 774773 TWh (23.0% of total)
- Hard coal: 534035 TWh (15.8% of total)
- Hydroelectricity: 359185 TWh (10.6% of total)
- Wind: 118733 TWh (3.5% of total)
- Petroleum products: 104498 TWh (3.1% of total)
This sums up to 83.8%, or almost exactly 1e+19 Joules. This means that either the remaining 16.2% is not listed, or the figures in the above list are -by accident- net numbers. However, the statistics pages state that they are gross numbers, so I assume that the 16.2% of smaller electricity-generating methods was simply not included.
At any rate, if we wish to make an order-of-magnitude estimation of what we can achieve with electricity-generating methods, we can very well live with a 1e+19 Joule consumption.
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