Skip to footer

US energy in five maps (infographics)

America has a lot of energy. Saxum, an Oklahoma City-based advertising and communications firm, has developed a portrait of the country's vast oil, gas, coal, solar, wind, and other resources (click each image for a larger version):  

2. Hydroelectric, nuclear, and biomass

(Credit: Saxum)

The sources comprising the first wave of clean energy are still some of the most prevalent today.

Renewables make up about 12 percent of electricity generation in the US, but of that hydroelectric dams (shown above as teal dots) contribute 56 percent. Most of those dams were built before the mid-1970s, as part of ambitious federal infrastructure efforts like the Hoover Dam in Nevada.

The orange blocks above show the top 20 percent of the most productive counties in terms of tons of potential biomass output. That includes gas emissions from landfills or organic waste from farming and timber industries. Together they make up about 12 percent of renewable electricity generation. 

There are 104 operable commercial nuclear reactors at 65 nuclear power plants (purple dots above) in the US, generating about 20 percent of the nation's electricity. Most definitions don't include nuclear as "renewable," since it relies on exhaustible uranium for fuel. It is "clean" in that it produces no carbon emissions, but nuclear waste and radioactive leaks can pose environmental threats.

Sources: Nuclear Research Council, US Army Corps of Engineers, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Saxum, Energy Information Administration

2 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.