Dr. Thomas B. Reed wrote on his Biomass Energy Foundation website:
The Rosetta Stone enabled scholars to decipher the Hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt into modern Greek and English.
Our Rosetta Stone Energy table below enables anyone to translate the obscure energy units we now use into the commonly understood kilowatts.
Starting with James Watt in the 18th Century, our use and understanding of energy has grown up in a very useful but confusing manner. The US and England used British Thermal Units, BTUs, while the rest of the world used Calories for heat. Fortunately, nowadays we can all use the kilowatt both for heat and electric energy. We have made the conversions here and show costs based on the Denver market.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
We invite you to make your own Energy Conversion table by downloading our Energy Rosetta Conversion spreadsheet and substituting the values applicable to your needs.
If you download the table you can click on the cells with red corners to see the assumptions used in making the table. You can then substitute values appropriate to your location and needs.
The spreadsheet table contains more columns than shown here. It shows typical values for the energy content of each fuel. It also shows the environmental cost of each fuel based for instance on a carbon dioxide credit of $30/ton. (Change to suit your needs below) and the total local plus environmental costs.
Electricity is a particularly difficult energy form to evaluate since some of it is almost free (from hydroelectric dams long since paid for) while newer sources reflect fuel or nuclear costs. To illustrate the range an value of electric costs I have included the humble AA battery which has a cost of $200 per kWh, 2400 times what we pay on the grid. Many people do not have access to grid based power and are paying $1-$10 for battery stored power or diesel generated power.
We have added a number of different prices for biomass to show the wide spread between highly processed biomass (pellets) and “junk” biomass (negative tipping fee).