Energy Literacy - Understand, Track, and Reduce Your Energy Consumption

I recently 'participated' in an O'Reilly webcast with the same title as this post.

This one hour webcast by Saul Griffith compared his 'lifestyle' energy consumption against the world average, examined the impact of CO2 levels on global warning, calculated how much various renewable energy sources must grow to minimize CO2 levels and finally how his 'lifestyle' must change to reduce the CO2 that he produces.

The world has known, calculable amounts of energy are available. In this webcast, we'll take a scientific look (physics and chemistry based) at all of the earth's energy resources, both stored (nuclear and fossil fuels) as well as renewable (solar, wind, wave, geothermal, tidal, wave, photosynthetic).

Looking at the sizes of each of these resources and comparing them to humanity's energy consumption is far from depressing. Although humanity uses a lot of energy, there are very large sources of non-carbon producing energy that can be tapped to meet our needs.

On the whole I found the webcast to be an eye-opener, especially in terms of the total amount of non-fossil fuel energy sources that must be developed in the next 20 years to keep CO2 levels at or below 450ppm.

For example, ALL of the following new non-fossil fuel energy sources must be built continuously over the next 25 years to offset fossil fuel use enough to keep or reduce CO2 to 450ppm:

====================  ==================== =============
Source                Amount               How often
====================  ==================== =============
solar cells            100 m2               every second
solar thermal          50 m2                every second
bio algae              1  olympic pool      every second
wind turbines          12 3-megawatt        every hour
geothermal steam       3  100-megawatt      every day
nuclear power plant    1  3-gigawatt        every week
====================  ==================== =============

Its hard to comprehend the scale of manufacturing needed to sustain this level of development. And making all those items will also generate CO2, so in reality even more non-fossil energy sources will be needed sooner to compensate.

The presentation did seem to drag a little for me at the beginning because the presentor spent perhaps too much time going into the details of his personal lifestyle energy consumption. However he does tie those details back into the presentation at the end by explaining how his lifestyle would need to change to reduce his CO2 output enough to reach a global per-capita average of 450ppm.

The webcast is based on youtube and is available in high-quality format. Broadband/dsl connection highly recommended.