The Energy Mix – Video

Coming Soon – January 2026
This popular Switch Classroom video is one of our all-time teacher and student favorites. It’s being completely remade with the latest data, new visuals, and updated insights so you’ll have even more engaging, accurate content for your classroom.

Transcript:

[Dr. Scott W. Tinker] From the Switch Energy Alliance, the Energy Mix. We’re going to look at the US and global energy mix and then talk about the scale of energy and some of the trends that we’re seeing. I’m going to start with a complicated figure, but we’re going to build it together. It’s called the Sankey diagram. We consume energy in the transportation, industrial, commercial, and residential sectors. The numbers you’re looking at are in quads. It’s a quadrillion BTUs, British thermal units, a big number. For the physicists in the crowd, it’s like an exajoule, about the same. For those in the oil and gas business, one quad is about the same as a trillion cubic feet of natural gas. It’s a big number [sic]. Now let’s put those in their place. What we’re going to do here is look at the energies from the left side that come into allowing these different sectors to happen. They follow our typical color code. Electricity generation, we’re using electricity as an end-use in every sector now, a little bit in transportation and it’s growing there. Oil, and by the way, the width of the bar here is sort of proportional to the amount of the number. Oil is mostly for transportation, but it’s used across all four sectors, as we’ve seen in other presentations. Biomass, a little bit. Coal, mostly for power generation, but directly in industrial processes, steel, and other kinds of things as well. Natural gas, very versatile fuel. See the width of the bars here directly for electric generation, but also in the other sectors. Some geothermal and these are again, United States data. This is back in 2010, okay. Here’s wind, hydro, nuclear, and finally solar. Now out of the right end of all this, with these fuels coming in, you see energy services or useful work that’s done. For the observant, you can see that that number of energy services, 38 is a lot less than what’s coming in the other end. That’s rejected energy. Let’s call it a waste or inefficiency. It’s the energy that we aren’t using to do something useful. That’s a big target for improvement. Now I’m going to jump forward almost a decade to the most current data and watch the changes on the left side here. You’re going to see natural gas go up. You’ll see coal go down, and you’re going to see the renewables, particularly wind go up some, so here we go. Natural gas gets wider. Coal got smaller and wind. I’ll do that again. Watch the red and the gray, red up, gray down. Here we go one more time with the wind and the orange up as well. Over eight years or so, you see that change. It’s not dramatic, but there is definitely a bit of a change in the energy mix as we go forward. Now, let’s take a look globally. This map represents the population of the world. Every color is about a billion people. All of the Western hemisphere is about a billion people and includes Australia and New Zealand. Africa about a billion. Europe and the Middle East, a billion. Look at the concentration of colors in Southeast Asia, parts of India, the Southeast Asia, and in the Indonesian Islands, parts of China; those are three to four billion people. The energy mix globally looks like this. Same color schemes. 85% of our energy comes from fossil fuels, oil, natural gas, and coal, nuclear, hydro, renewables. That’s the world mix. Does it vary geographically? Well, it turns out North America looks about like the world, a little more gas. Europe, as you might expect, doesn’t look too different either. Russia has a lot more natural gas in its mix. Over half of its energy. South America has more hydro in blue. Africa, more coal in gray. The Middle East won’t surprise anybody; it’s mostly oil and gas, with a few other things starting to happen. Now, Southeast Asia, and in that sense, we’ll include Australia. Over half the world’s population gets half their energy from coal. That coal is more than the rest of the world combined times two or more. That’s total energy. That’s not electricity generation. I’m going to shrink these pie charts and grow them to be proportional to demand relative to North America. Here we go. You see Africa and South America and the Middle East; they just don’t consume that much energy at this point. They’re growing their economies, even Russia. There are fewer people there, of course. The big consumers are those that are the most industrialized, with Asia being the biggest of all. Has it changed through time? Yeah, everything has gone up. We’ve tripled the amount of energy we consume over the last 50 to 60 years. You can just see the renewables coming in on top there in the yellow and the green, the green color on the very top being biomass. This is a composite satellite view of the world at night. Look where the lights are on, and I’m not advocating lights being on at night. I don’t think we need to have them on as much as we do, but you can see the dark oceans and then the outlines of the continents and where the lights are on in the world. Remember these, and let’s shrink and grow them to be proportional to demand. Now you know not only why they’re on, but where they’re on. You can see the relationship between access to energy and wealth, growing your economy, the wealthy parts of the world, the wealthier parts have access to energy. There are those who would advocate to leave oil, natural gas, and coal in the ground, and some would even push that farther to nuclear, the orange color. This is what would be left if we did that. Do you think the Middle East is going to go for that? How about Africa? They don’t have much energy now look at what would happen. Russia, the Asia Pacific, over half the people in the world. Is that going to happen? Europe gets three-quarters of its energy still from fossil fuels and North America even more than that. What would happen if we did that? Well, when you start to turn the lights down by 86%, the world gets pretty dark. You end up keeping a lot of people in poverty, and it’s not the intention, but it’s the outcome. The intention is no fossil fuels, bad for the environment, lower CO₂ emissions, good intentions, but perhaps not the way to get there. We’ll talk about that in other presentations. Better, I think, to lift them from poverty, turn the lights back on, and have different strategies for reducing emissions while also increasing access to energy and growing the economies of the world. Look at Africa for a second. Just imagine as a thought experiment would happen if we were able to light up Africa. Think of the impact of having access to energy, not just on housing and clothing and food, but on education, on women, the rights and freedom of women who are disadvantaged when they have to go for the water or cook inside with wood or dung and immigration and migration away from parts of the world now that are impoverished and have leaders that are controlling the countries. It’s just so many major issues that are affected by access to energy. Again, we’ll talk about these in other presentations. Key points, a mixed portfolio, energy choices are very important, and it’s going to vary by the resources that you have and other kinds of things, political systems, and economic systems, okay. It changes slowly. It takes a long time, and it’s not political will. It’s the technology. It’s the cost and the other drivers of change that have this energy mix transition so slowly through time. Join the Switch Energy Alliance, help us inspire an energy educated future.