At AEI’s link below, you can view a new animated “bar chart race” visualization using the online Flourish software, this one showing US electricity generation by energy source shares from 1949 to 2019 (through April) based on data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Here are few observations:

1. Coal has historically been the largest energy source for America’s electricity generation, and provided more than 40% of the nation’s electric power in every year between 1949 and 2011, and more than 50% in 43 of those 59 years.

2. Although natural gas provided more than 20% of US electric power from 1959 to 1972 it provided less than 20% from 1973 to 2008, less than 15% of US electricity from 1982 and 2005 and a record low of less than 10% in 1988. In 2011, natural gas provided more than 25% of US electric power for the first time when oceans of shale gas were accessed for the first time in shale rock formations with revolutionary drilling and extraction technologies (hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling) and its share quickly surpassed coal for the first time in 2016. During the last full year (2018) natural gas provided 35.5% of electric power versus 27.7% for coal, its lowest share in the history of these EIA data.

Read the full article of observations and see the animation from AEI at : https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/animated-chart-of-the-day-us-electricity-generation-by-fuel-source-1949-2019/

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