US Energy Usage By Type

You hear a lot about the death of coal and the rise of renewables, but I haven't seen the data in a format that I've really liked so I put that together.

I took the data from the EIA. Note that this is referring to our electrical grid.

First, I wanted to just look at the total energy usage. That source has it broken up by state, type, and year. I didn't care about the states, so I organized it by type and year. An interactive plot for that is below:

Next, I wanted to look at the relative usage. To do that, I converted the previous plot into percentages of total. I also broke that up by 'fossil-fuel' and 'other'. Interactive plots for those are below:

You can clearly see in these that coal dominated most of recent history and is still quite prevalent. Natural gas is starting to take over, and the only clean source that's really taking much of the share is wind. Solar is growing rapidly but is still a very small part of total power generation.

Most alarming to me is that we're still very reliant on fossil-fuels. Over 50% of our power still comes from them, and our total fossil-fuel usage for power generation has increased by over 25% since 1990 even with a sharp uptick in renewable usage. This also does not include things like transportation that are almost completely fossil-fuel based.