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Green Energy and Technology - Energy for a Warming World Part 8

Bề mặt Trái đất, biển và bầu không khí hấp thụ bức xạ mặt trời, và điều này làm tăng nhiệt độ của chúng. Không khí ấm có chứa nước bốc hơi từ các đại dương tăng lên, gây ra lưu thông khí quyển hoặc đối lưu. | Chapter 5 Known Knowns and the Unknown A very Faustian choice is upon us whether to accept our corrosive and risky behaviour as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic. E.O. Wilson An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it. James Lovelock I believe that a scientist looking at non-scientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy. Richard P. Feynman 5.1 Diverging Supply and Demand If one could imagine and this is probably quite easy for many people that busi-ness-as-usual were possible to the end of the century and that population numbers were to plateau at 10.5 billion as is generally predicted then consumption trends 1 suggest that we will require to find 25-30 TW of power in 2050 to feed the seemingly unquenchable thirst for energy of industrialised and modernising societies. The trend is shown in Fig. 5.1 where the uppermost curve solid line diamond markers depicts estimated power consumption for an energy profligate business-as-usual BAU scenario while the lower curve solid line square markers presumes that a slightly diminished rate of growth could occur due to peak oil i.e. rising energy costs owing to diminishing liquid fossil fuel reserves after 2020. In energy terms 25 TW for a year equates to 788 X 1018 J or 747 X 1015 BTU. Ensuing calculations will be based on the less harmful 25 TW figure. Of this half will be expended by industry a quarter by transport a sixth by domestic users and a twelfth by commerce 1 . But by 2050 if we have somehow managed as we must to wean ourselves off fossil fuels 25 TW will not be there to consume because renewables can provide only a frac A.J. Sangster Energy for a Warming World 125 Springer 2010 126 5 Known Knowns and the Unknown tion of this. In Chap. 3 it has been demonstrated that as far as electrical power goes the most that mankind can plausibly expect to extract from renewables is in the region of 14 TW .