Now let's look inside the energy end use boxes.

First, let's look at buildings, commercial and residential.

Here are a few things to notice.
The total energy use used for residential buildings in the US
is about 40% larger than commercial buildings.
Second, notice the ratio of space heating to cooling.
For residential, that ratio is a lot larger than it is for commercial.
There's a simple explanation for this.
Commercial buildings are larger, so they have a smaller ratio of surface area
to volume.
They're more dominated by the internal heat that
comes from people and other equipment used inside,
and also by the solar gain, and they lose less heat,
so it takes a lot more relative energy to cool them and less energy
to heat them in the same climate zone.
Third, many people are concerned about the energy
use of their personal electronics.
I think that's because they're so visible in our lives.
But notice what a small fraction of energy is used for electronics,
either in commercial or residential.
Now let's dig a little deeper into the energy use inside our homes.
This shows you where energy goes inside US residential dwellings.
Here's a couple things to look at.
First of all, even though air conditioners are a big deal,
we use much more energy for space heating than for cooling.
I think somewhat surprisingly, we use about as much energy
for televisions and related equipment as we do for cooking.
Clothes washers use a very small amount of energy,
but that's just the energy directly to run the clothes washer.
The main energy used for clothes washing is heating,
and that's counted in hot water heating, which is itself a much larger energy
use.
The energy used for refrigeration and lighting is roughly similar.
Note how both of these are significantly larger than energy used for computers.
A lot of people are worried about the energy use
for the transformers that charge their cell phones,
but that is absolutely tiny.
Finally, remember that these vary greatly across the country.
So while overall heating is a lot larger than air conditioning,
that's not true in the summer in the hot parts of the US,
where air conditioning loads are much larger than heating loads.
Now let's look at industrial energy use, the biggest of our four sectors.
Notice that it's dominated by two interrelated big ones--
production of chemicals and petroleum products,
which of course includes petroleum refining, that for example
makes the gasoline used in the transportation sector.
Notice how much more energy goes into your food
than into all the computers and electronics you purchase.
Now finally, let's turn to transportation.
A few things to notice.
First of all, cars are important, but in the US
they're just a little bit more than half of total transportation energy use,
and in many countries they're actually a little less than half.
Heavy freight modes-- that means rail, shipping, and heavy trucks--
are about a third of total energy use.
Notice that pipelines count in the transportation sector,
even though we don't think of them as moving around the way cars
and airplanes do, and they used more energy than railroads.
So now let's return to the complicated overview of the flow of energy
throughout the US economy.
Here are a couple of high level simplifying things to remember out
of this blizzard of complexity.
First of all, essentially all coal goes to electricity.
Almost no coal is used for anything but electricity.
Second of all, transportation uses almost nothing but petroleum fuels.
A tiny bit of electricity, but at this point, almost ignorable.
Third, natural gas goes more or less everywhere,
a kind of even split between gas going to electricity,
and then gas going to residential, industrial, and commercial.
Petroleum mostly goes to transportation, but a significant amount,
something like 20% of it, goes to chemical uses and direct fuel use
in the industrial system.
These Sankey diagrams often show rejected or waste energy.
For electricity, this number is clear cut and unambiguous.
We know how much energy flows into the electricity system,
we know how much electricity is generated,
so there's no uncertainty in figuring out how much energy
is wasted in that conversion process.
But often, these diagrams also include rejected
or waste energy from residential, commercial, industrial,
and transportation.
But those numbers are deeply ambiguous.
There's no question that energy is wasted,
but you should be suspicious about the specific numbers,
because there's no perfect way to calculate how much energy
is wasted, say, in transportation, because it's in efficacy, not
in efficiency.