Energy in the United States
When people discuss "energy," they're often thinking about electricity, but most of the energy consumption in the US is from fuel burned for heat or transportation, not to generate electricity.
This chart is from 2023; it's a little outdated, but it's still reasonably accurate in 2026. It's published by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; it shows the flow from generation of energy to consumption (or waste). It estimates the total energy production from not just power plants but stoves, cars, trucks, jets, industrial boilers, etc, and aims to encompass everything in the US. Note that the units are in quadrillion BTUs; BTUs are a unit of heat, and direct electricity production has a conversion factor applied here.
The four bottom categories are greenhouse gas generators.
A couple things that are notable to me:
Transportation is the biggest sector for consumption. Within that sector, personal vehicles account for more than half of energy use. Note that "light trucks" includes SUVs - this is a "personal vehicle" category. Shipping-type trucks are next, followed by airplanes. As a fraction of total energy, individual people's cars make up 15% of energy use in the nation.
Similarly, the industrial sector's energy is almost entirely fuel- and heat-based. The most recent manufacturing energy study is from 2022, when the consumption was around 20 quadrillion BTU vs the current 26 quadrillion BTU. About 35% of the energy use in that sector is turning fossil fuels into feedstocks for plastics, other chemicals, and/or fertilizer; much of the rest is process heat.
it's crazy to me how much of the energy use is paper products!
Another note is on residential energy consumption. It's a pretty small sector and it's about half electricity, half direct heat. I often hear electricity production in the press described in terms of "number of homes powered", usually assuming the ~1 kilowatt of electricity being used on average by the average home, but that doesn't capture the actual energy use across the nation (which is about 2x higher). It also isn't necessarily a great mental benchmark for overall energy impact, because electricity for homes is only about 5% of total energy consumption in the US.
The other big note is on the "rejected energy" vs "energy services" on the right. Most of the energy released when fossil fuels are burned is wasted as unused heat! This is especially true for cars, for which only around 12-30% of the energy actually goes towards moving the car (and only ~4-20% of that goes towards moving the passengers). It's also true, though, for things like gas stoves, water heaters, and thermal power plants - much of the energy is just waste heat.
All together, there's significant potential to reduce emissions in the US by addressing residential/commercial/industrial heating (whether by improving efficiency with heat pumps, electrifying, or improved equipment) and electrifying transportation.
One other note: datacenters. They don't show up in any of these categories as notable because on a nationwide energy scale, they're not as significant as cars or residential heating or paper (yet). (For completeness, they fall under the Commercial sector by this accounting method). Estimates of power consumption I've found include ~30 GW for 2025, which would be ~262 TWh, or approx 280 TWh in 2025. That's about 0.89 quadrillion BTUs, coincidentally the same amount as the solar contributions to the energy mix in 2023, and less than 1% of total energy use in the US. The best I can say is that it's both a little and a lot - a small fraction of a very very large number.
I include this note partially because I see a decent amount of attention going towards datacenters' energy consumption these days and I would like to say "yes, and": yes, and it is urgent to electrify transportation (where a direct 1:1 substitution of an electric car for a gas car results in ~6x less total energy use). yes, and it is urgent to build dense housing that facilitates public transit and reduces transportation energy use as well as heating/cooling energy use. yes, and there may be programs in your state to help you install heat pumps or electric water heaters that can make your home use much less energy. yes, and there's a huge amount of energy going to heat and cool offices and malls and factories and even a small improvement to insulation or small decrease in usage across a large number of buildings is meaningful. yes, and even if no new datacenters were built from today onward, there's still a huge amount of power in the US that could be replaced with nuclear, geothermal, hydro, wind, and solar. yes, and please advocate in your area for clean power generation.
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