Ezra Klein posts a really neat graphic showing where the US gets its energy from and where it goes to:

A better representation is by means of a Sankey diagram.

Such Sankey diagrams exist currently for the U.S., the U.K., Spain, and Switzerland.

Funny. The picture (Sankey diagram) didn't show up before, and it is not in the article that you linked to.

I recently presented a talk about this issue in Ljubljana to the Slovenian Simulation Society. Here is a link to it (streaming video, 1 hour).

Very cool indeed,

On a slightly related note I saw a stat not to long ago showing that the Internet is using about 5% of the worlds current energy output, quite how much of that is useful energy spent, who knows.

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What the above diagram shows is that the U.S. is currently producing more than 85% of its total energy from fossil fuels. Most countries produce somewhere between 65-70% from fossil fuels.

Another 8% are produced from nuclear power. Everything else together: solar, wind, biomass, hydro, geothermal, account for only 6% of the total energy consumed in the U.S.

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A better representation is by means of a Sankey diagram.

Looks like a Sankey diagram to me.

Oops, I linked to the blog home page rather than the post permalink, which is here. Sorry.

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On a slightly related note I saw a stat not to long ago showing that the Internet is using about 5% of the worlds current energy output

I don't think anyone has a really good handle on this. A report in the (London) Times last year by Jonathan Leake and Richard Woods (get it before it vanishes behind the Dirty Digger's pay wall) quoted Gartner, an IT&T industry analysis firm, as estimating that the global IT industry (of which the Internet is only a modest part) as producing "about 2% of global CO2 emissions".

Unfortunately, Leake is not a reliable correspondent. The cited Internet energy usage report also carries a retraction. Leake's and Woods's claim that "performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea" is rubbish.

If Gartner has been accurately reported though, it is a fairly reliable source.

Originally Posted by Noir

I saw a stat not to long ago showing that the Internet is using about 5% of the worlds current energy output.

Well, that would be a funny statistics. The Internet per se doesn't use any energy at all ... only the servers do that the Internet resides on, and the notebooks that the users access the Internet from, and the routers that transfer the information from the servers to the clients.

Thus, it makes much more sense to discuss, how much energy is being used by the computer hardware, and here we face another difficulty. A lot of the energy used by computers is not in the form of electricity to run programs, but rather in the form of air conditioners to remove the heat generated by the servers. Actually, the cooling of the servers uses more energy than the servers themselves.

The next question then is, whether it is really necessary to cool the servers down to 20 degrees Centigrade, which is the temperature at which most servers are being operated. A lot of energy could be saved by allowing the servers to run at 30 degrees Centigrade ... and probably, there would be no negative side effects from doing so.

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The next question then is, whether it is really necessary to cool the servers down to 20 degrees Centigrade

The servers are not cooled down to 20 degrees but 20 degree or rather less temperature air is required to keep them at their maximum temperature of 40-50 degrees. I think I have seen reports of Google and perhaps other major server farmers locating their next farms in north Canada and perhaps even Iceland, where the equipment heat can be directed to socially useful purposes.