Comment by tonfa
7 hours ago
Yes but primary energy isn't a good metric. There's 40-60% loss when converting fossil fuel to final energy being consumed.
7 hours ago
Yes but primary energy isn't a good metric. There's 40-60% loss when converting fossil fuel to final energy being consumed.
A lot of energy is used for heating, heating water is more efficient with fossil fuel than with electricity - because for electricity you have transmission loss.
Fossil fuels have transmission losses too. You just don't see them.
40% of all global shipping is used for fossil fuels. [1]
10% of the energy in a barrel of crude oil is used to refine it. [2]
I'm not even counting the energy cost of crude oil extraction, pipeline leaks, hauling gasoline, diesel and LPG to its final destination, or the million other places where energy is lost.
1. https://cleantechnica.com/2026/06/16/shipping-freight-energy...
2. https://autoexpert.com.au/posts/the-energy-cost-of-petrol-pr...
That used to be the case, but with the efficient heat pumps that have come out in the last few years, that is no longer true. Since you’re using electricity to move heat rather than produce it, it’s two to three times more efficient than burning fossil fuels for heating.
That’s fair, but factoring the energy loss in, it still remains the clearly larger share.
Does it, though? Assuming 80% of energy use is fossil and fossil has a 50% loss, if all that fossil were to transition to ~100% efficient electricity[0] we'd already be at 33% of our renewable electricity needs. That's quite a bit more than the 20% the "80% fossil" seems to suggest!
"One-third done" sounds an awful lot like we're going to start seeing optimistic "we'll be halfway there at the end of the decade" headlines soon...
[0]: Things like the grid and car batteries don't operate at 100% but closer to 95%, but things like heat pumps operate at 300% efficiency, so I reckon that'll more-or-less cancel out for back-of-the-napkin math.
Yes we're not done yet, but renewable only started gaining share again around 2010, and how quickly solar/battery is being deployed is really impressive.