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How much energy does Britain use - and how much could we generate without burning fossil fuels? Physics professor David MacKay has been doing the sums.

Dieter Helm and his colleagues in Oxford estimate that under a correct account, allowing for imports and exports, Britain’s carbon foot- print is nearly doubled from the official “11 tons CO2e per person” to about 21 tons. This implies that the biggest item in the average British person’s energy footprint is the energy cost of making imported stuff.

Figure 15.8. Energy requirements of different forms of freight-transport. The vertical coordinate shows the energy consumed in kWh per net ton-km, (that is, the energy per t-km of freight moved, not including the weight of the vehicle). See also figure 20.23 (energy requirements of passenger transport).

Xbox1602.4 Sony Playstation 31902 Nintendo Wii182

I think that it’s a good idea to switch off such a charger – it will save you three pounds per year. But don’t kid yourself that you’ve “done your bit” by so doing.

We use about as much to heat and cool ourselves (in Britain) as we use to move around in our cars, while lighting uses onlu a graction of that energy - especially using low energy fluorescent bulbs or the new generation of LED lights. Hydro-electric power in Britain, however, even with generosity from the wet Highlands, will only deliver about one third of the small amount of energy we use to light ourselves. How unfortunate that such accidental power-concentrators as mountains and streams are not more plentiful, and not just, maybe, for the energy benefits.

my own domestic gas consumption

It’s been estimated that making each unit of petrol requires an input of 1.4 units of oil and other primary fuels (Treloar et al., 2004).

The total amount of car travel in the UK is 686 billion passenger-km per year, which corresponds to an “average distance travelled by car per British person” of 30 km per day.

I want to estimate the energy consumed by someone who chooses to drive

United Kingdom

focus too much on economic feasibility and they miss the big picture.

but you should find it easy to redo the calculations for whatever country or region you are interested in.

“Okay – it’s agreed; we announce – ‘to do nothing is not an option!’ then we wait and see how things pan out...”

This heated debate is fundamentally about numbers.

if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little.

BP’s website

Many tidal energy extraction systems are just extracting energy that would have been lost anyway in friction.

over 30 years.

In Japan, thanks to strong legislation favouring effi- ciency improvements, heat pumps are now available with a coefficient of performance of 4.9.

For forest-dwellers, there’s wood. For everyone else, there’s heat pumps.

143The average internal temperature in British houses in 1970 was 13 °C! Source: Dept. of Trade and Industry (2002a, para 3.11)

Power consumption per capita, versus GDP per capita,

Figure 30.1 (p231)

The only notable ex- ception to the rule “big GDP implies big power consumption” is Hong Kong.

March 30th 2009. Join the Group Read. Chapter 18. A first balance (Instructions on how to join are at the bottom of the original post) This is the first chapter attempting to balance-up consumption and production. While the story told so far of the raw energy potential from renewable sources shows an ecouragingly close race to maintain our rich lifestyles with sustainable energy sources, a little digging provides much disappointment. Between the potential and the realisation lies a factor of over 100! From a production potential of 180 kWh per day per person, we get to an actual production figure of just 1 kwh/d/p and a "realisable" estimate of 18 kwh/d/p---a full ten times less than our consumption. Looking at the heart of the physics problem, David MacKay points to the geographically diffuse nature of renewables: each person needs a huge amount of land, tidal exposure, wind per person to make the sums add up. The sustainable potentials, as David emphasises, need "country-sized solutions". "To get a big contribu- tion from wind, we used wind farms with the area of Wales. To get a big contribution from solar photovoltaics, we required half the area of Wales. To get a big contribution from waves, we imagined wave farms covering 500 km of coastline. To make energy crops with a big contribution, we took 75% of the whole country." Yet protection of species, habitats, nature, beauty etc. all move the same people who want to reduce fossil fuel dependency to limit the installations. Something will need to give to balance our energy ...

It’s been estimated that the average person’s lifestyle consumed a power of 20 kWh per day

I am partly driven to this conclusion by the chorus of opposition that greets any major renewable energy proposal. People love renewable energy, unless it is bigger than a figleaf.

completely forested the country

The nuclear decommissioning authority has an annual budget of £2 billion. In fact, this clean-up budget seems to rise and rise. The latest figure for the total cost of decommissioning is £73 billion. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7215688.stm