Great Britain halved the carbon intensity of its electricity in fourteen years, ran a full year without coal, and made wind its largest single source. Meanwhile demand fell for two decades while the country plugged in 1.8 million electric vehicles. This is what the numbers show, including the bits that spoil the story.
Lawrence Livermore publishes a Sankey diagram every year showing where American energy goes. In 2024, 62.27 of 94.61 quads did no useful work at all. What rejected energy means and what a quad is, why the chart’s own method makes renewables shrink the waste rather than add to it, why transport alone is more than a third of the national total, and the three things that would actually fix it.