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If countries like China, India, Malaysia, Nigeria etc. start to have per-capita energy use close to that of the United States, global energy consumption could e
by Analemma_ 8y ago
If countries like China, India, Malaysia, Nigeria etc. start to have per-capita energy use close to that of the United States, global energy consumption could easily double or triple even without any increase in population.
I said "if", but I really should say "when", because this is what's expected to happen as these countries modernize and start getting things like air conditioning on the same scale as US households. 79 TW of capacity will become a necessity sooner than you think.
- logfromblammo 8y agoAlso, if that much excess would otherwise be wasted, we could always use it to smelt aluminum, form it into big tanks, attach standard docking rings, fill them up with water, and launch them into a designated band of refueling orbits. Those would almost certainly be useful later in space technology development.
- wizardforhire 8y agoOr condense air and harvest co2 for sequestering.
- spacenick88 8y agoAlmost no one in Europe has per-capita energy use anywhere close to the US, so why would China? And I don't think it's just that we have less AC, though that's surely the strongest contributor.
- xyzzyz 8y agoWe have less AC, but we have more heating, which is more energy intensive than AC.
- weberc2 8y agoI’m doubtful about both of these claims (Europe has more heating than the US and that heating is more energy-intensive than AC). The latter seems particularly hard to believe given how efficient heating is compared to A.C.
- 0xCMP 8y agoIt may have to do with where the heat comes from? I live in southern most areas of US, but from what I understand it's common for heating to use Gas/etc. instead of electricity. Therefore they use less "energy" (i.e. Electrical energy) All just a theory
- sampo 8y agoThe most efficient way to heat would still be generating electricity from gas. You lose 50% of the energy (well, you can still use part of the residual heat for heating, too), but with the electricity, you can run a heat pump that heats with about 400% efficiency. 50% × 400% is still 200%, so twice as good as burning gas for heat.
- satya71 8y agoI don't have the numbers. But intuitively, AC should be less energy as it's energy transfer. Heating is usually directly adding energy to the living environment. You can get heating using heat pumps (some southern US homes have this type) but it doesn't work very well when it's too cold outside. Europe should have more heating than US, with it's more northern location.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoIndeed. Heat pumps routinely have efficiencies[0] around 400%-500%, because they're not really "producing cold", they just move energy from one inside to outside (or the other way around). -- [0] - of course that's a specific meaning of "efficiency"; they're still less than 100% efficient in terms of energy expended on moving other energy around vs. theoretical minimum.
- nwallin 8y agoElectric heaters are more efficient than traditional air conditioning units. Transferring heat from inside a 80F house to the 110F air outside is not very efficient, only about 30-60%. On the hand, an incandescent light bulb is a ~99% efficient heater. The only energy that is "lost" is the light which is radiated out the window. Space heaters and electric radiators are 100% efficient. Additionally, heat pumps are can be spectacularly efficient when it's warm outside (in which case, who needs a heater) but are still more than 100% efficient when it's cold outside. Waste heat is still heat, after all. The problem with heat pumps is that the quantity of thermal they can put into a house drops dramatically when it's cold outside. When it's extremely cold outside, the only heat you're added to the place you're trying to heat is the waste heat from the unit itself. Swamp coolers can be very efficient "air conditioners" but they only work in extremely dry environments. Heat exchangers that pull cold water from a nearby cold lake (for instance, there are data centers in Chicago that use the lakewater from Lake Michigan) can be highly efficient, but there's a lot of infrastructure involved, and they only work on warm land near cold water.
- wongarsu 8y agoFor reference for anyone curious: the US has a final energy consumption of 6.0kW per capita, the EU average is about 2.9kW. (2009 data) At that point, China was at 1.3kW/citizen, Africa at half that, India on the level of Africa and the middle East slightly below the EU with 2.3kW. Wikipedia [2] uses world bank data instead which seems to measure differntly, but the relations are roughtly the same. 1: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/final-energy-consumption-million-toe-3/ener16_table_01 https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/final-energy... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co...
- tasty_freeze 8y agoI'm confused by your wording and by wikipedia. Watts are a measure of power, not energy. kWh is a measure of energy.
- wohlergehen 8y agoIn the same sense as your server has an "energy consumption" of 2000W, i.e. 1W <=> 356*24/1000 kWh/a.
- wongarsu 8y agoBy saying they use 6kW I mean that each year they use 6kWa (kilowattyears), or 52569 kWh. And 6 kilowattyears per year is the same as 6 kilowatt.
- jopsen 8y agoExactly, As we see efficiency increase as well.. things are not as bad. Sure energy consumption will increase, but not to US levels.
- roenxi 8y agoWe should expect increases in efficiency vs the US to /increase/ energy use relative to US levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- bobthepanda 8y agoThe main issue is that Americans have much more house than Europeans do. The three-car garage McMansion with double-height ceilings and a double-height foyer is a ridiculous amount of space to cool down and heat up for a single household. Nice visualization of that kind of data: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7ei5f4/comparing_average_house_size_in_us_to_europe/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7ei5f4/com...
- whatshisface 8y ago>The three-car garage McMansion with double-height ceilings and a double-height foyer is a ridiculous amount of space to cool down and heat up for a single household. That's definitely not a significant contributor to American energy usage, given that not everyone in America is a millionaire.
- selectodude 8y agoThere are 139 homes for sale in the Dallas Metroplex that have 6 or more bedrooms for $600,000 or less.
- whatshisface 8y agoThere are 1.318 million Dallas residents. 139/1.31M = 0.0001. Not too significant.
- bobthepanda 8y agoThat's not that amazing of a metric. For starters, households are what track to a house, not residents. Then you also have to consider what proportion of that population is looking to buy a house at any given time; most people tend to stay in a purchased home for a long time, so they may already live in a McMansion style house.
- sneak 8y agoMcMansions are McMansions because they are cheap to construct and cheap to buy (and surrounded by thousands of nearly identical structures).
- mirimir 8y agoDemand for AC will increase greatly, no?