Did you ever wonder where our electricity comes from?

By David McClelland

Well, I did and I did the research. What I learned was most interesting.

The sources of the electricity in the U.S. in descending order are:

Coal – 56%, Nuclear – 22.38%, Natural Gas – 9.3%, Hydroelectric – 9.3%,
Petroleum – 3%, Biomass/other - .02% and, Imported - .02%. It would appear that coal
mining won't become obsolete any time soon. And, the percent of our electricity that still comes from coal is our most polluting and most plentiful fossil fuel.

What is Biomass, you ask? I learned that it is derived from timber, agriculture, food processing wastes and from fuel crops. It also comes from sewage sludge and manure.

Nuclear – No CO2 is expelled into the atmosphere directly from nuclear fission, but when the entire nuclear fuel cycle and plant construction are taken into account, Nuclear produces 4 or 5 times the emissions of renewable energy. If we look at uranium mining and milling, processing, enrichment, fuel fabrication, transportation from centralized manufacturing sites, reactor construction and nuclear waste disposal, it does pollute.

Where you live has a lot to due with your source of electricity. For example, in California, in 1999, 47.2% came from natural gas, 21.1 % from hydroelectric, 17.4% from nuclear, 11.9 % from "other" and only1.2% from coal. In Michigan, we get 68.2% from coal, 14.1% from nuclear, 13% from natural gas, 2.7% from "other," including 1.4% from petroleum and .5% from hydroelectric. As you might expect, West Virginia gets 98.6% of its electricity from coal.

What about solar panels and windmills? So far, those sources are so small, at least on a percentage basis, that they don't even show up in the statistics. Sad, but true.

My last question was, "Where does Michigan's coal come from?" From what I could learn, 100% of our coal is imported from other states, namely Wyoming, Kentucky and Montana. We paid $1.36 billion to import coal in 2008 for our power plants.

Any questions?