The following question was recently posted on Quora:
“What are the top 10 energy topics that the general public should understand?”
Read the following responses from industry experts:
Carl Lumma, worked on Apple product efficiency:
1. The difference between energy and power. Power is the rate of energy use. Don’t tell the FTC, which proudly measures energy in watts: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2010/06/l...
2. World energy consumption is split roughly as follows: 1/3 transportation, 1/3 industrial, 1/3 residential.
3. Energy is necessary for prosperity. Its use was a hallmark of the industrial revolution about 200 years ago, which was the greatest change in human society since the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. Money has even been equated with energy in thermoeconomic models.
http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-A...
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarr...
4. Prior to industrialism, almost all wealthy communities used slaves. Since the industrial revolution, slavery has been rapidly abolished on a global scale.
5. Prosperity generally results in reduced NOT increased environmental impact. In prehistory, Homo sapiens are thought to have caused the extinction of all megafauna in the world, the razing of vast areas of land, etc. Today, we observe a strong negative relationship between prosperity and population growth.
6. Thomas Malthus did NOT conclude that mass starvation is inevitable because population grows faster than food production. He concluded that starvation had always limited the population. More specifically, he concluded that increases in production had until his day been used to increase the birth rate rather than per-capita prosperity. Working harder wouldn’t make people better off. This is the widely misunderstood “Malthusian trap” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal...
Malthus’ day happened to be during the industrial revolution, which is probably why he noticed. Production grew more quickly than the population could, and that was unusual.
7. Nuclear fission is a deeply disruptive technology. Its discovery 70 years ago can only be compared with the domestication of fire in terms of the ability of humans to control fundamental forces of nature.
8. Ionizing radiation is not a uniquely harmful pollutant.
9. Anthropogenic climate change is occurring, but its consequences are widely misunderstood. Consensus estimates call for net positive economic effects in the next 50 years, and net negative ones in the following 50, on the order of 1-2% world GDP. Tragically though, the poorest 1B people will be hit negatively the whole time (mostly by drought). Of course there is considerable uncertainty in climate projections but because it would be economically beneficial to decarbonize anyway, it makes no sense not to.
10. Lithium is a deeply disruptive technology. 100% of new cars sold in the US will be Lithium-powered EVs within 10 years. Lithium automobiles are completely sustainable, fully scalable, and will provide better reliability, higher performance, and lower cost than alternatives (including gasoline).
Mike Barnard, Energy guy:
An incomplete list:
- The world’s population will peak in around 2050 at around 9 billion people, but the consumption demands of those people will be much closer to North American consumption footprints. Overall demand will rise enormously, whether it be for transportation, lighting, computing or industry.
- There are no magic bullets to replace fossil fuels in the near term, and existing fossil fuel reserves will continue to be burned for transportation, heating and electricity. This includes large volumes of ‘dirty’ coal. Continued efforts at creating ‘clean’ coal technologies to mitigate the worst impacts are crucial.
- There is no magic bullet of energy that will meet all needs. Nuclear is good for base load, but poor for the highly peaky energy demand seen now in North America and other modern economies. Green sources are supplementary, with wind, for example likely only to provide 8-20% of any given nation’s energy needs. A mixed energy grid will always be required and it will vary by jurisdiction.
- Many urbanization patterns that are economically viable in cheap oil scenarios become marginal or non-viable in expensive energy scenarios. Urban sprawl and ex-urban living with their demands on long-distance driving, large swaths of poorly utilized tarmac and costly-to-maintain infrastructure will become challenges to maintain. Urban densification with its higher ability to support transit, shared heating/air conditioning/insulation and economies of scale for food, consumer goods and waste transportation will become more strongly the norm. Country living with a first world standard of living will increasingly be the preserve of the rich.
- Anthropogenic global warming will continue unchecked. With it will come stronger storms and larger waves. Hurricanes will continue to ravage ports, causing disruptions in oil, coal and natural gas shipments. Current understanding of waves indicates that the vast majority of offshore drilling rigs and oil tankers are not built to withstand very large waves (80+ ft), which are now understood to be much more frequent and larger. The costs of extracting and shipping fossil fuels in the future will be both higher than it is now, and higher than a mere projection of fossil fuel prices accounts for (with the exception of natural gas in the US, which will see a reversal of this for perhaps up to a century).
- Distributed generation including wind, solar, biomass, etc will continue to increase in prevalence as part of the overall energy mix. They will continue to be increasingly cost effective against fossil fuel and nuclear alternatives. The required investment in smart grid technologies and a variety of energy storage solutions will have secondary and tertiary economic benefits and costs that are not well understood at present.
- Moving to carbon neutrality is important, but the path is likely not a straight line. Capture of carbon at source is assumed to be critical, but three emerging technologies are examples of how non-linear thinking achieves the same results:
a/ air carbon capture such as that pioneered by Global Thermostat [1] uses waste industrial heat to capture carbon from normal air, avoiding the challenges of scrubbing carbon from toxic, high temperature, corrosive effluents.
b/ creating hydrocarbon-based fuels directly from C02 plus energy [2]
c/ fungi (along with quite amazing antibacterial properties) can be used to create hydrocarbon-based fuels from, essentially, waste in a carbon neutral process
[1] http://globalthermostat.com/
[2] http://www.wired.com/science/dis...
L(Luis) Figueroa, Ph.D in EECS, UC Berkeley; Professor of EECS at NC State and UF; High School Science teacher:
There are several energy related technologies that need addressing.
1. Given the US has the largest coal reserves in the world and large deposits of natural gas, it is imperative to develop cost-effective scrubbing technologies that will limit Carbon emissions, in particularly for coal. In the case of natural gas, it’s integration with battery technology could help wean ourselves from petroleum.
2. Efficient energy storage such as high storage batteries and capacitors that can be cycled for at least 10 years with minimal degradation.
3. Security for the electrical grid is an area of increasing concern. This would involve technologies related to both cyber and physical security (for example solar geomagnetic storms and man made electromagnetic transients such as a high altitude nuclear detonation). Any significant and long term disruption of the grid would have serious consequences for modern society.
4. Environmentally friendly techniques for extracting petroleum from shale rock formations
5. Promise and potential pitfalls of geothermal energy generation in volcanically active areas and other areas. While potentially important, there could be consequences in terms of the excitation of earthquake faults in some areas. It also appears that geothermal could be attractive in non-volcanic areas and also serve as a local power source for concentrated use of electrical power, such as one might find in server farms.
6. Future prospects for fusion and why we never quite seem to reach it. Are there are any fundamental limits that we might have missed?