Energy efficiency in transport
Open-knowledge reference entry
The energy efficiency in transport is the useful travelled distance, of passengers, goods or any type of load; divided by the total energy put into the transport propulsion means. The energy input might be rendered in several different types depending on the type of propulsion, and normally such energy is presented in liquid fuels, electrical energy or food energy. The inverse of the energy efficiency in transport is the energy consumption in transport.
Energy consumption in transport is often described in terms of fuel consumption, fuel consumption being the reciprocal of fuel economy. and linked with a means of propulsion which uses chemical energy, whilst energy efficiency in general is applicable to any sort of propulsion. In order to compare the energy efficiency in any type of vehicle, it helps to use the International System of Units including joules for energy and metres for distance. The more efficient the vehicle, the more metres it covers with one joule (more efficiency), or the fewer joules it uses to travel over one metre (less consumption). The efficient use of energy in transport largely varies by means of transport. Different types of transport consume from some dozen kilojoules per kilometre (kJ/km) for a bicycle to several thousand for a car. Several distinctions are often not clear:
The energy content of liquid fuels is well known, but not always exactly which fuel is used or whether its value was converted or not.
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This entry incorporates text from “Energy efficiency in transport” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.