The latest report from Ember, a global energy think tank, says the way we measure energy can distort our understanding of the transition now underway. The paper highlights why accurate energy accounting matters for public policy and decision-making. In the video below, Dave Borlace distills Embers’s work and helps us gain understanding of an issue that affects us all.

Ember reports:

The orthodox approach makes no allowance for quality, assigning equal value to one exajoule of primary coal and one exajoule of solar electricity, despite the fact that the solar produces three times as much final electricity as the coal. …Electricity is a high-quality energy carrier capable of delivering precise work, whereas fossil fuels primarily deliver heat before they can perform useful tasks.

For decades this efficiency gap was not very important because most of the growth in energy came from inefficient sources. But the collapse in the cost and the rapid growth of electrotech over the last decade have altered the situation materially. In 2025 for example, solar and wind supplied almost all the growth in electricity generation, and in 2024 electricity was half the growth in final energy demand.

,,,in 2023 roughly 380 exajoules, nearly two-thirds of all primary energy inputs, are wasted, and do not convert into useful energy. This has been well framed as the primary energy fallacy, and we examined it in detail at RMI. When petrol powers a car, roughly three-quarters of the energy is wasted as heat rather than motion. A coal-fired power station converts less than 30% of its fuel into final electricity, wasting the rest as heat. These losses stem from fundamental physics. Combustion releases heat in all directions; capturing it for useful work requires additional conversion steps, each governed by thermodynamic limits.

Electrotech sidesteps this problem. An electric motor converts electricity to motion at over 90% efficiency…

.

British Columbia is seeing the expenditure of tens of billions of public and private dollars to expand consumption of fossil fuels. Instead, it could be spending a fraction of that to develop and install efficient renewables such as solar and wind. The important thing is that those technologies deliver electricity directly. No need for inefficient combustion to create useful energy. Also, no need to damage the climate.