Hi Folks,

Here are some preliminary numbers for 2016.  EIA just released these last Friday, so they are very fresh, although a few people have seen some of this coming by watching the monthly reports.

U.S. coal generation fell from 33.18% of total generation to 30.4% of generation.  That's an 8.5% reduction in coal use. 

Natural gas generation rose from 32.66% of total generation to 33.84%.  Natural gas is officially the largest source of electric generation in the U.S.

Note that the increase of natural gas was only 42.51% of the decrease of coal.  Wind and solar made up most of the difference.  Efficiency caused the rest of the decrease and more, as follows.

Wind increased from 4.67% of total generation to 5.55%. 

Solar increased from 0.94% of total generation to 1.38%.  EIA started estimating the amount of distributed (behind-the-meter) generation in the U.S. three years ago, but this estimate is utility-scale solar only.  The two previous years where EIA estimated distributed solar varied a lot, so I'm happy to guess that total solar is about 35% larger than this reported value, but don't anyone quote that.  They reported their estimate for 2016, but I haven't taken the time to find it and plug it into my spreadsheet.

Efficiency is impossible to measure accurately.  It is much large than most people think.  My approach pegs U.S. electric utility efficiency at a rate of new savings of about 1.7% in 2016.  But that obscures the fact that what actually happened in 2016 was that cumulative efficiency programs and efficiency standards eliminated something more than ten percent of total electricity consumption which would have happened without the efficiency.  In other words, efficiency has eliminated all new growth since the Great Recession.  It has also saved several tens of billions of dollars per year.  U.S. electricity spending in 2016 was $381 billion (down $10 billion from 2015).  It is also impossible to know exactly how much growth would have happened without the efficiency, but it is a safe bet that that $10 billion in savings was due to efficiency.  Without efficiency there would probably have been more growth, and the savings are probably larger. 

To accurately estimate efficiency savings you must decide on a start year.  Or you can do as I have done here, and estimate savings for a single year - somewhere between $38 billion and perhaps $48 billion. 

Skip Laitner testified to Congress in 2006 or 2007 that efficiency had added 77% of all new capacity to U.S. energy from 1970 to 2005.  That is all fuels, and includes the substantial savings caused by the CAFE standards.  But it also gives a sense of the power and importance of efficiency. 

I can get into details of all of this, but I find that there is very little interest in the fine grained info.  I encourage anyone who is interested in solving climate change to contact me for updated information about our efficiency programs in Ohio.  They are hardly the strongest in the nation, but we have eliminated over 8% of utility carbon in seven years as of the end of 2015.  I'm going to update the Ohio numbers after I post this message.  Our Ohio programs have created about $10 billion in savings, $6 billion of which have been realized and $4 billion of which are assured by installed hardware with remaining useful life.  Most states don't produce the sort of data which is necessary to do this sort of calculation accurately, so the Ohio experience is important in that it is an example of how powerful efficiency is, and how much money it saves.

- Ned