Reply #45: The data you need is here [View All]

[GliderGuider]

EIA primary energy consumption (XLS)
BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009 (XLS)
Conversion of quads to TWh

According to the EIA Table 18 in the first link, total world primary energy consumption in 2006 was 472 quads. At 293 TWh/quad and 8760 hours/year that comes out to 15.8 TW. Cool.
The fossil fuel portion of that table comes out to 407 quads, or 119,000 TWh.
From the BP table in the second link we find that the total fossil fuel consumption (oil, NG and coal all normalized to mtoe) for 2006 was 9502 mtoe.
Now the thermal energy of 1 toe is about 12 TWh. so 12*9502= 114,000 TWh.

114,000 is near enough to 119,000 to write the discrepancy off to data-gathering techniques (EIA and BP would have different sources and methodologies). It's clear that the 15 TW figure was derived using the thermal energy content of fossil fuels, with no allowance for the actual work done.

The electricity required to replace the work done/electricity produced by fossil fuels with wind-generated electricity would be much lower because of the higher efficiency of electricity. BP gives a conversion efficiency of 4.4 TWh/toe for electricity rather than the 12 TWh/toe of thermal energy. Thhis seems more realistic.

If we leave all the other energy sources in the BP worksheet untouched and just replace the fossil fuels with electricity at the 4.4 TWh/toe conversion, the world today would only need on the order of 6 TW instead of 15.

Jacobson screwed up.

On edit: Corrected a couple of GWh vs. TWh mistypes.