Climate Policy

[Concillian]

So long as we're trading links, I'll throw this one onto the pile. It is decidedly not a cost-benefit analysis, but rather a physical look at what is possible and realistic, and what is not.

David McKay's "Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air"

-Jester

Very interesting book. I haven't finished it, but I appreciate the approach of looking at things with a universal unit (in this case kW/h).

It also had some very interesting statistics which I had wondered a bit about. Like the 1800 kW/h to produce a computer... something I had wondered a bit about seeing things like our bank of (8) 30 kW power supplies x2 per production line and around 40 10kW supplies for powering the physical vapor deposition processes (per line)... for just one step of making a hard disc.

I went and looked at my last energy bill, and noticed my household's average daily usage for that period was 0.7 therms per day (natural gas) and 16.6 kW/h per day (electricity). The universal unit thought had me find a converter ( http://www.unitconversion.org/unit_conve...gy-ex.html ) and I found that 0.7 therms per day was roughly equivalent to 20.5 kW/h per day.

Most interesting is that my natural gas bill portion is larger in terms of net energy usage, but ~$20 vs. $60 for electricity. I guess part of that is because most of the electricity losses happen at the plant, and the natural gas losses happen on-site, but still interesting.

As I was reading, my wife asked what I was doing. After some explanation, I summarized with "it's pretty interesting stuff." This resulted in a very strange look and and a muttering of "Yeah... to you!" It's a long tough road ahead to illicit real change. I've made changes to household consumption that are showing consistent cuts of about 20-25% over last year on my bill, but as the author points out, that's only scratching the surface when considering all sources of energy usage. Additionally, doing more gets more and more difficult.