od energy group read

This river of reading material and advertising junk pouring through our letterboxes contains energy. It also costs energy to make and deliver. Paper has an embodied energy of 10 kWh per kg. So the energy embodied in a typical personal flow of junk mail, magazines, and newspapers, amounting to 200 g of paper per day (that’s equivalent to one Independent per day for example) is about 2 kWh per day.

A new car’s embodied energy is 76 000 kWh – so if you get one every 15 years, that’s an average energy cost of 14 kWh per day. A life-cycle analysis by Treloar, Love, and Crawford estimates that building an Australian road costs 7600 kWh per metre (a continuously reinforced concrete road), and that, including maintenance costs, the total cost over 40 years was 35 000 kWh per metre.

Shadowfax the horse weighs about 400 kg and consumes 17 kWh per day.

It doesn’t require high-cost hardware, in contrast to solar photovoltaic power.

Tide farms, tide barriers and two-way tide pools sound very attractive. And they won't make the world stop turning. Unfortunately, even for the rather tide-rich British Isles, we can only really hope to cover something about equivalent to our lighting and gadget energy consumption this way. And the economics of building large installations are not yet clear. Stuff, on the other hand, is much less attractive. Just making and transporting it -- TVs, food, drink, packaging, cans, computers ... -- is our biggest single consumption category. Reducing the stuff-intensity of well-being seems like a good goal.

To summarize all these forms of stuff and stuff-transport, I will put on the consumption stack 48 kWh per day per person for the making of stuff (made up of at least 40 for imports, 2 for a daily newspaper, 2 for road- making, 1 for house-making, and 3 for packaging); and another 12 kWh per day per person for the transport of the stuff by sea, by road, and by pipe, and the storing of food in supermarkets.

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.

As for a 500 ml water bottle made of PET (which weighs 25 g), the embodied energy is 0.7 kWh – just as bad as an aluminium can!

Computers Making a personal computer costs 1800 kWh of energy. So if you buy a new computer every two years, that corresponds to a power consumption of 2.5 kWh per day.

Similar arguments can be made in favour of carnivory for places such as the scrublands of Africa and the grasslands of Australia

In which we learn that to get by on wave power you need to be very very insular -- that is, have a small number of people per unit length of exposed coastline (sounds like a nice place to me, but the British Isles don't fit the description) -- and also that our food habits, especially for red-blooded carnivores with meat-eating pets -- amount to more than half our driving habit in energy. There is a real energy case to be made for vegetarianism (approximately twice as efficient) and even more for veganism (another doubling).

The typical diet has an embodied energy of roughly 6 kWh per kWh eaten. Coley (2001) estimates the embodied energy in a typical diet is 5.75 times the derived energy. Walking has a CO2 footprint of 42 g/km; cycling, 30 g/km. For comparison, driving an average car emits 183 g/km.

Eating meat requires extra power because we have to feed the queue of animals lining up to be eaten by the human.

Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food. Albert Bartlett

While wave power may be useful for small commu- nities on remote islands, I suspect it can’t play a significant role in the solution to Britain’s sustainable energy problem.

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All the energy saved in switching off your charger for one day is used up in one second of car-driving. The energy saved in switching off the charger for one year is equal to the energy in a single hot bath.

paving 5% of the UK with solar panels seems beyond the bounds of plausibility in so many way

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.

Loch Sloy’s surface area is about 1.5 km2, so the hydroelectric facility itself has a per unit lake area of 11 W/m2. So the hillsides, aqueducts, and tunnels bringing water to Loch Sloy act like a 55-fold power concentrator.

Feb 7 2009. Join the Group Read. Chapters 5 and 6. Flight and Solar Will solar energy technologies allow us to sustainably take those long-haul flights to get our winter dose of sunshine? On the way, we discover that flying intecontinentally once per year has an energy cost slightly bigger than leaving a 1 kW electric fire on, non-stop, 24 hours a day, all year, despite the fact that modern planes are twice as fuel-efficient as a single-occupancy car. It may be no surprise, therefore, that Airline businessman Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, has developed a Swiftian the solution to the problem: " The best thing we can do with environmentalists is shoot them."