Bummer about the burner, odeon; hate it when that shit happens.
As for all this save the energy to save the world shite, I think we're all being conned.
Unfortunately it's not just that, it just doesn't work; because since the source is still dirty and demand is constantly increasing... well do the math. All this energy saving crap is merely slowing down an accelerating upward trend at best, absolutely fuck all at worse.
Energy conservation makes sense in terms of stretching out our fossil fuel reserves and minimising the damage we do while we migrate to sustainable and less environmentally harmful sources of energy. The ultimate goal should be to have essentially unlimited clean energy, which is perfectly feasible with current technology, but if we exhaust our fossil fuel reserves before we have adequate renewable sources to replace them, the results will be pretty catastrophic.
I suppose that's true, but unless industry is serious about adapting to clean renewable technologies immediately (as it'll take ages to convert everything), then this path of conservation alone, is an eventual dead end.
Renewables are getting serious attention in the EU. Wind turbines have been springing up all over the place here in Scotland; the EU's largest windfarm is just south of where I live, and government projections are for 50% of Scotland's electricity to come from renewables by 2020. Solar is doing well in other places, and the way things are going, I think most of the world might manage a fairly graceful transition to renewables over the course of this century.
Not without coal or nuclear to back it up it won't. Solar and wind on their own can't generate the power you need for the average suburban block, even running at low power, and there are still appliances that need to be switched on all the time, such as fridges and electronic clocks and alarm systems. They say that coal was supposed to have taken 70 million years to produce to get to where we were at the start of the industrial age, and they say we've almost used up the supply in 200 years.... But given the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and vulacanisation is happening all the time, albeit slowly, how did they arrive at that figure? Also, countries are still unearthing coal and oil deposits that are only just being discovered, and exporting them to other places for trade. Makes you wonder.
Also, why haven't the scientists put more of an effort into researching and developing clean nuclear fusion generators?
Whitelee Wind Farm, near where I live, currently has 142 turbines. Each one is rated for a peak output of 2.3MW and has an average output of 28% of that, amounting to 5640 megawatt-hours per year per turbine. The average UK household uses
4.8 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, so each wind turbine produces enough electricity to power 1175 households, or about 167,000 households for the entire wind farm. The numbers are reduced when transmission, load balancing and energy storage are taken into account, but these aren't silly little things mounted on people's garages that struggle to power an alarm clock.
Coal and oil aren't formed through volcanic action; they're formed through the burial and fossilisation of carbon-rich organic matter, and they only form under a very narrow range of circumstances. Only a very tiny percentage of ancient organic material has survived to the present day in the form of coal and oil deposits, and of that, only a small part is economically recoverable. Most of the newly tapped coal and oil deposits are deposits which were previously known, but which used to be uneconomical to exploit due to low quality and difficulty of extraction, and have only become economical due to rising prices and declining reserves of higher quality, easier to extract coal and oil. The most significant period of coal formation was during a 60-million-year period called the Carboniferous, so my guess is that the 70-million-year figure comes from counting the Carboniferous and possibly some other, briefer period of coal formation.
Scientists and the governments who fund them have put considerable effort and resources into the development of fusion power, but it's really, really difficult to generate electricity from fusion reactions in a safe and cost-effective manner, and the research is ongoing.
