What happens when you plug your Prius in? Are you ultimately drawing power from coal, nuclear, wind, biomass? It depends on where you live.
Most of us know that America generates its electricity from a multitude of sources, as shown in this graphic:
However, that pie chart doesn’t accurately represent the breakdown in any single state (although Arkansas comes close), because state by state, electricity is generated from a cocktail of up to nine different sources. The Nuclear Energy Institute has posted a chart, current as of 2017, that shows the percentages of each source that each state uses.
The Washington Post has created the following image to give you some idea of the source by region:
Sadly we don’t have an information designer on staff, but we took the NEI chart and dropped it into Excel to crunch the numbers a bit. While some of the findings were expected (like West Virginia running almost entirely on coal), some were surprising (Washington D.C. runs almost 100% on natural gas). Here’s what we found:
Coal
Top 5
West Virginia – 94.4%
Wyoming – 85.9%
Kentucky – 84.7%
Missouri – 76.8%
North Dakota – 70.8%
Bottom 5
District of Columbia – 0%
Rhode Island – 0%
Vermont – 0%
California – 0.2%
Idaho – 0.4%
Nuclear
Top 5
South Carolina – 57.6%
New Hampshire – 55.9%
Illinois – 52.6%
Connecticut – 45.5%
Maryland – 39.6%
Uses 0%:
Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming
Natural Gas
Top 5
District of Columbia – 99.7%
Rhode Island – 95.6%
Delaware – 92.4%
Mississippi – 79.7%
Nevada – 72.9%
Bottom 5
Vermont – 0.1%
Hawaii – 0.4%
West Virginia – 1.7%
Nebraska – 1.9%
Wyoming – 2.4%
Petroleum
Top 5
Hawaii – 66.6%
Alaska – 14.5%
Massachusetts – 1.3%
Maine – 1%
Delaware – 0.6%
Uses 0%
Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin
Hydro
Top 5
Washington – 68.1%
Idaho – 59%
Oregon – 56.7%
Vermont – 55.6%
South Dakota – 39.9%
Uses 0%
Delaware, District of Columbia, Kansas, Mississippi, New Jersey, Rhode Island
Geothermal
Top 6
Nevada – 9.7%
California – 6.3%
Hawaii – 2.7%
Utah – 1.4%
Idaho – 0.6%
Oregon – 0.3%
Every other state uses 0%!
Solar/PV
Top 9
California – 9.6%
Nevada – 6.4%
Vermont – 4%
Arizona – 3.5%
North Carolina – 2.9%
New Mexico – 2.4%
Utah – 2.3%
Massachusetts – 2.2%
New Jersey – 1.3%
Of the remaining states, these use 1% or less…
Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas
…and these states use 0%:
Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, District of Columbia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming
Wind
Top 5
Iowa – 36.6%
South Dakota – 30.3%
Kansas – 29.6%
Oklahoma – 25.1%
North Dakota – 21.5%
Uses 0%
Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia
Biomass and Other
Top 5
Maine – 27.4%
Vermont – 24.9%
New Hampshire – 9%
Massachusetts – 6.4%
Hawaii – 5.5%
All other states use Biomass at 5% or less. The remaining states us 0%:
District of Columbia, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming
________________________
Here are some things that jumped out at us:
– Every single state uses natural gas.
– Isolated Hawaii is heavily reliant on petroleum.
– Sixteen states don’t use petroleum at all.
– Every single state, except three and Washington D.C., use biomass, though in primarily fledgling amounts. That means more states (47) use biomass than nuclear (30), although the gross output is obviously vastly different.
– Solar uptake is shockingly small, with 16 states using 1% or less and 26 states using zero.
If you’d like to see how your own state stacks up, click on over to the NEI chart.
