The electrified share of final energy

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The number that decides what the phrase "energy transition" can mean. Electricity is not energy; it is one carrier among several, and on the accounting used by the International Energy Agency it supplies only about a fifth of world total final energy consumption. The rest is delivered as combustion at the point of use: petrol and diesel in vehicles, gas and oil in boilers and furnaces, coal and coke in blast furnaces, kerosene in aircraft, heavy fuel oil and marine gasoil in ships. This is why the two most commonly quoted transition statistics can both be true and point in opposite directions. Renewables now supply a large and rapidly growing share of *electricity generation*, and in several national grids more than half of it. The same renewables supply a far smaller share of *final energy*, because four fifths of final energy never passes through a wire. The transition therefore has two distinct halves — decarbonising the electricity that exists, and moving energy services that are not electric onto electricity at all — and only the first is going quickly. Every sector object in this Journey is an answer to the second question. Not a place.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.