Re: Energy Sources

Eli, that table actually refers to the generating capacity of new facilities – c.1300 MW over the next few years. There’s not really any way these small facilities can be described as “power stations.” The average capacity of an oil-fired facility (and a lot of them are fired by petroleum products like coal-to-liquids and waste/residual oil) is 17 MW. Compare that to natural gas (average 79 MW per facility), Coal (220 MW) and Nuclear (1015 MW). Of course, they’re still more significant than renewables (13 MW per facility)…

A further EPA table illustrating capacity additions and retirements during 2005 can be found here. As can be seen, significantly more small petroleum capacity was lost that year than gained. I think that’s been the pattern for a while.

So yes, petroleum is a very small part of the mix, but it isn’t being fed by vast imports from oil-producing countries.