Thursday, January 14, 2016

All-of-the-Above Energy: In Nevada, That Ranges From Natural Gas to the Frontier of Battery Technology

hand­ful of en­ergy facts about Nevada that might just sur­prise you:
The first is that Nevada runs on … nat­ur­al gas. No kid­ding. True, the Hoover Dam is right there, about a half-hour east of Las Ve­gas. But ac­cord­ing to the U.S. En­ergy In­form­a­tion Ad­min­is­tra­tion (EIA), Nevadans used more nat­ur­al gas than any oth­er fuel in 2013 (last year for which the data is avail­able) – 282 tril­lion Btu and then some, 10 times the hy­dro­elec­tric power used.
Fuel for power gen­er­a­tion? Sim­il­ar story. Nat­ur­al gas is far and away the state’s No. 1 source for elec­tri­city in 2015 – gen­er­at­ing more than 3,100 Gwh. No oth­er en­ergy source gen­er­ates more than 500 Gwh, ac­cord­ing to EIA. And here’s something else about Nevada and nat­ur­al gas: EIA data shows Nevada led the en­tire United States in re­du­cing car­bon di­ox­ide emis­sions on a per cap­ita basis from 2000 to 2013 – down nearly 43 per­cent. Draw your own con­clu­sions.
That said it would be hard to find a bet­ter ex­ample of an all-of-the-above en­ergy state than Nevada. There’s the afore­men­tioned Hoover dam (hy­dro), there’s geo­therm­al en­ergy, coal, bio­mass and oth­er re­new­able sources. The broad ap­proach also is re­flec­ted tech­no­logy-wise, with Tesla Mo­tors’ sprawl­ing lith­i­um ion “Giga­fact­ory,” now un­der con­struc­tion in the desert near Sparks, pla­cing Nevada on the fron­ti­er of the ad­vanced bat­tery stor­age in­dustry.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/sponsor-content/api/americas-energy/all-above-energy-nevada-that-ranges-from-natural-gas-frontier-battery-technology?mref=home_left_native

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