United States electricity sector

There has been not only gi owth m the total number of electric motors (more standard appliances in use), but also a proliferation in their use for new, novel applications. Both trends will continue to increase demand for the electricity to run electric motors. In the United States, electric motors arc responsible for consuming more than half of all electricity, and for the industrial sector alone, close to two-thirds. Since the cost of the electricity to power these motors is enormous (estimated at more than 90 billion a year), research is focused on finding ways to increase the energy efficiency of motors and motor systems. 

Since the early 1990s the United States has imported more oil than it has produced for its own use. And, as the nuclear option became frozen, coal has become the chief source for gcirerating electricity, which itself accounts for about 35 percent of the energy sector. In 1997, 52 percent of electricity produced in the United States was generated from coal and in other recent years the fraction has approached 56 percent. Since the United States accounts for one—quarter of total world energy usage, the increase in coal use in the United States alone has a significant... 

Transportation accounts for about one-fourth of the primary energy consumption in the United States. And unlike other sectors of the economy that can easily switch to cleaner natural gas or electricity, automobiles, trucks, nonroad vehicles, and buses are powered by internal-combustion engines burning petroleum products that produce carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and hydrocarbons. Efforts are under way to accelerate the introduction of electric, fuel-cell, and hybrid (electric and fuel) vehicles to replace sonic of these vehicles in both the retail marketplace and in commercial, government, public transit, and private fleets. These vehicles dramatically reduce harmful pollutants and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 50 percent or more compared to gasoline-powered vehicles. 

Demand for natural gas, in all markets—residential, commercial, and industrial—is projected to grow into the foreseeable future, particularly in the electric power generation market and the industrial sector. Total natural gas use in the United States is projected to grow from 20.1 quadrillion British thermal units in 1992 to 26.1 by 2010, an average growth rate of 1.6 percent per year. 

In the United States, in the commercial sector, the most attractive application for near-term fuel cell technology is onsite cogeneration. In this application, the fuel cell power plant is located at the site of the end user, providing both electric and thermal energy. On-site applications in the commercial... 

Therefore there are generation costs (Figure 1.5), wholesale costs (above), and transportation and distribution costs. The total for us, the end user, June, 2007 came to 18.9c/kWh. The national average cost of electricity generation in the United States in 2007 was about 4-5c/kWh, but it varies from region to region. In 2007 the national average "retail" prices by end-user sector were as follows ... 

Petroleum and natural gas supply over 75 percent of the total energy consumed in the United States and these two fossil fuels are expected to play a continuing role as major sources of energy for many years to come. Oil, which currently supplies 46 percent of our total energy has become an essential part of our industrial and transportation and electric power sectors and without sufficient supplies of oil our economy would first falter and then collapse. Because of restrictive laws and Federal government actions, the production of petroleum in the U.S. has peaked and has been declining since 1970 when it reached 11.3 million barrels per day. 

The dual policy goals described above intersect in the transportation sector, which has become the focus of much of the DOE hydrogen program (DOE, 2003a). Present-day transportation in the United States relies almost exclusively on petroleum and contributes an amount of carbon to the atmosphere nearly equal to that from coal used in electric power production (see Figure 2-7). Thus, in principle, the... 

The volume of economically beneficial or neutral uses of C02 is a fraction of the carbon produced by the current electric power industry in the United States, let alone the transportation sector. Total U.S. emissions of C02 are around 6.2 billion metric tons annually. 

Aluminum. Aluminum is used extensively in modem India particularly in house wiring and the transmission of electrical power, about 50% of the production going for this use. All of the technology has been imported primarily from the United States. Production has increased from about 3000 metric tons in 1951 to 180,000 metric tons in 1977. It is estimated that the demand for aluminum in 1984 will be 400,000 metric tons. The demand is likely to increase dramatically since the per capita use in India is 0.4 vs. 22 kg in the United States and of 2.9 kg in the rest of the world. Aluminum today is produced in five producing plants, four of them in the private sector and one in the pubhc sector. The most serious problem with the aluminum industry is the pricing pohcy. By law, 50% of production goes to the government at a fixed price, so-called levy metal. The current levy price is 903 a metric ton vs. a production cost of 1,084 per metric ton. 

Table 10.2 also shows the natural gas or electricity requirements required to produce hydrogen for the fleet of vehicles and compares these requirements to projected use of natural gas and electricity for other sectors in the United States. For the moderate growth case, natural gas requirements for the entire projected fleet of FCVs accounts for 1%, 7%, and 19% of total projected natural gas consumption in 2030, 2040, and 2050, respectively. These results suggest that the additional natural gas requirements in the early stages of the transition to a hydrogen economy would not add considerable extra demand on the natural gas markets. By the third decade of the transition, one would expect a more centralized system of hydrogen production to develop, particularly for the more heavily populated areas. 

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