"Understanding the Future of Sustainable
Energy"
Challenges
Climate Change
Pollution
Energy Standard
Scale
Economic
National Security
Scale of Energy Use
It is difficult to grasp the
scale in which energy is used in the United States. In 2006 -99.87
Quadrillion BTU of energy was consumed in the United States (1.053x1020
Joules)
.
Averaged over a year that is 3.34x1012 W or 3340 GW.
Most humans can exert no more than half a horse power over a minute.
If by a miracle a human could sustain half a horse power (372.85 W) over a
year it would take 9 trillion human beings to meet the U.S. power demand.
Source
Output
Quantity
Human
373.85 W
9x109
Large Wind
5x106 W (40% capacity factor) 1.67x106
Large Gas Turbine 500x106 W
6680
Nuclear Plant
2x109 W
1670
The scale of energy use is huge and will continue to grow . To meet
this huge demand power must be generated on a large scale. This is why
gas turbine plants are large and nuclear plants are huge. Even with
huge 2 GW nuclear plants it would take 1670 nuclear power plants to generate
the total amount of energy consumed in the U.S. in 2006.
With a huge power demand a huge energy source is required to meet the demand. Solar and wind provide a huge amount of available energy to meet global power consumption. Wind can only be economically converted to electricity in high wind areas. Solar is by in large the earth greatest energy resource. In fact, most energy resources (except for tidal energy) can be traced back to the sun. Therefore, why not use solar energy directly?
Available energy flux vs. energy consumption. 87,100 TW is the amount of
sunlight that falls on the Earth's surface, 370 TW is all the energy in the
wind, and 15 TW was the global rate of energy consumption in 2004.
(Source data from
Tester, Jefferson W.; et al.
(2005). Sustainable Energy: Choosing Among Options. The MIT Press.
ISBN 0-262-20153-4.)
Header: Early 20th century Alternator made in Budapest, Hungary, in the power generating hall of a hydroelectric station (photograph by Prokudin-Gorsky, 1905-1915).(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gorskii_04414u.jpg)