This archive report was first published on 29 November 2019.
Electricity Production and Distribution ¶
Published on November 29, 2019, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that most of the nation's electricity is generated by coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy.
Renewable energy sources, including hydropower, biomass, wind, geothermal, and solar power, generated about 17% of the country's electricity in 2017.
Electricity is produced from various primary sources, including oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear fission, biomass, geothermal, and solar thermal. These sources are used to create steam, which moves the blades of a turbine, or directly move the blades of a turbine in the case of hydropower and wind power.
Photovoltaic (PV) panels convert sunlight directly to electricity using semiconductors.
Electricity Transmission and Distribution ¶
Electricity in the United States travels long distances from generating facilities to local distribution substations through a transmission grid of nearly 160,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines.
Generating facilities provide power to the grid at low voltage, which is then increased by transformers to minimize power losses over long distances.
As electricity is transmitted through the grid and arrives in the load areas, voltage is stepped down by transformers at distribution substations and finally lowered further for use by customers.
Plug-In Vehicles and Electricity Infrastructure Capacity ¶
According to a study by Northwest National Laboratory, existing U.S. electricity infrastructure has sufficient capacity to meet about 73% of the energy needs of the country's light-duty vehicles.
Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) developed deployment models that demonstrate the potential for synergies between plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) and distributed sources of renewable energy.
Utilities, vehicle manufacturers, charging equipment manufacturers, and researchers are working to ensure that PEVs are smoothly integrated into the U.S. electricity infrastructure.
