Technology:

Geothermal: The 2nd Most Efficient Source of Electricity (The Wall Street Journal)

According to Energy Points, fossil fuels return the least amount of electric power for fuel consumed, while wind generates the most, followed by geothermal, hydro, nuclear and solar.

The true cost of electricity is difficult to pin down. That’s because a number of inputs comprise it: the cost of fuel itself, the cost of production, as well as the cost of dealing with the damage that fuel does to the environment.

Energy Points, a company that does energy analysis for business, factors in the these myriad values in terms of what percentage of the energy input—fossil fuel energy, plus energy for production and energy for environmental mitigation—will become usable electricity.

The chart above shows that fossil fuels yield, on a national average, only a portion of their original energy when converted into electricity. That’s because they are fossil fuels that require other fossil fuels to make the conversion into electricity; their emissions, such as carbon dioxide, also require a lot of energy to be mitigated. Renewables, however, have energy sources that aren't fossil fuel and their only other energy inputs are production and mitigating the waste from that production. That actually results in more energy produced than fossil fuels put in. Geothermal, the 2nd most efficient fuel for electricity, creates 514% of its original energy inputs when converted into electricity; on the other end of the efficiency spectrum, coal retains just 29% of its original energy.

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