Session 9

This week’s lesson is basically about energy and technology to advance towards a sustainable society. The quote I like the most this week is “ IF EVERYONE CONSUMED AS MUCH ENERGY AS THE AVERAGE SINGAPOREAN AND U.S. RESIDENT, THE WORLD’S OIL RESERVES WOULD BE DEPLETED IN 9 YEARS”.

In China and India, they use about 50 – 60% less amount of resources than Singapore and U.S. Hence, there is a need for renewable energy sources to work towards sustainability. There also exist a need for development of new technologies and approaches of energy conserving technologies and pollution prevention.

What is energy security?

Energy security is to obtain a constant and sufficient fuel and source diversity and increasing efficiency. There are 2 types of people who use energy differently. Energy could be used as a source of national income as the country could sell of resources for income. For the poor countries, energy would be biomass stoves and solar refrigerators to save electricity.

The current transportation is very dependent on the liquid fossil fuels to create electricity and facilitate the transportation of people. Hence, maybe people could think of more ways to use the energy from above the ground rather than below the ground. The use of other energy such as Renewable energy comprises of about 19% of the total amount of energy in this world, while fossil fuels are 78% and Nuclear 2 %. It is surprising to know that the total energy used by people in 1 year is actually less than 1 hour of energy that the sun provides to the Earth. Hence, human could actually derive energy from the sun for 1 hour to be able to sustain for 1 year.

Before the 1950s, the US uses mainly renewable resources to drive energy. However, after 1950s, the usage of the fossil fuels such as coal and oil allowed the renewable energy such as trees to grow. Technology sometimes comes from the necessity for some technology instead of invented for a single need. An example would be the invention of steam engine to pump the water out from coal mines, but was later used for other uses.

We do not see the costs of non-renewable, but we see the costs of the renewable. In fact, the non-renewable energy which is being consumed will emit carbon gases which may cause green house effect and hurt the environment. It is a lot cheaper to built coal and gas pipes and harder to build machines and instruments to utilize renewable resources as a driver for energy. However, the effects of using non-renewable resources are slowly surfacing and will definitely affect human activity.

China is currently the biggest investor in clean energy. However, the most successful investor of renewable energy is actually Europe. Germany is the top investor in Solar, although it has four seasons. It could even reach 30% renewable energy in 2020. The government gave cash incentives to people who put up solar panels, getting more people to install solar panels to earn a profit. Is it possible for the world to achieve 100% renewable energy by year 2050? In technical terms, it is entirely feasible and saving a lot of resources and economically.  However, there are Social, Economic and Political factors that will affect or stop people from using renewable resources. Social factors would be values and people are unwilling to change to renewable resources. Economic factors also affect the usage of non-renewable energy as non-renewable energy is cheaper than renewable resources and the structure for renewable resources are very expensive to build and takes a long time to earn back the money. Political factors apply as many countries do not want to buy energy from other countries for the country’s economy and do not want the currency to flow out of the country as there is a fixed demand for electricity in the country and if that happens, a fixed amount of money will flow out of the country.

The presentations this week consists of offshore wind farm, hybrid solar energy and anti-matter. I think the most interesting to me would be offshore wind farm as it is the most feasible technology that could solve the problem of low non-renewable energy. Offshore wind farms are construction of wind farms in bodies of water. The benefits are tremendous as it is able to produce enough electricity to power 400,000 homes and reduce dependence on foreign oil. Although there are opposition to wind farms such as damage to migrating birds, high Cost, detrimental effect on property values, superstitions, I believe that human would have no choice in the future but to rely on renewable resources if they want to maintain their current state of life.

The rating that I would give for this week would be 9/10 as it is interesting to discover many different ways to reduce energy consumption in the world.