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Energy demand will not increase in the next decade. It will, instead, fall, as it has in recent years. Electricity demand will increase as that takes over for
by ncmncm 4y ago
Energy demand will not increase in the next decade. It will, instead, fall, as it has in recent years.
Electricity demand will increase as that takes over for other energy uses that will be collapsing.
- dekken_ 4y agoYou appear to be contradicting yourself, but I imagine you don't think you are, so you might want to elaborate.
- Gwypaas 4y agoHe is not contradicting himself. You have to remember the awful efficiency of thermal engines. Primary energy demand will decrease because you do not lose 70% of the energy by simply cooling it like in steam turbine used by nuclear power plants or car engines. On the other hand, electricity usage will increase because you have now replaced your 30-40% efficient engines with 90+% efficient engines, but from a different source. That barely have any losses from the primary energy input.
- dekken_ 4y agoThanks for that
- belorn 4y agoSince we should keep the oil in the ground that current thermal engines uses, the energy input will be from a different source when we change from burning oil to electrical engines. The primary energy input should be from the wind, sun, elevated water, nuclear bonds and geothermal. The change from 30-40% efficient engines to 90+% efficient engines is if we burn the oil in a power plant. It is an improvement, but not a sufficient big one compared to actually keeping the oil in the ground.
- ben_w 4y agoYou basically can't get 90% efficiency from burning oil in a power plant. E = 1 - Cold/Hot, where cold ≈ 300 K and hot ≈ 1300 K (gasoline-air fire), giving theoretical maximum efficiency of 77%. In practice much lower, what I've seen is just over 60% even in the best combined cycle power plants. If you use some really high temperature chemistry, you can get to 5260 K from dicyanoacetylene in oxygen, which is 95%, but not gasoline. And dicyanoacetylene is a bit explody.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y agoTrue enough, but I’m hopeful for an energy-abundant future where we figure out how to make solar, wind, nuclear, and batteries cheaply and at scale. Imagine what we could do if energy efficiency didn’t trade off against carbon output. We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years. And the resources it takes to do that could be redirected elsewhere.
- ncmncm 4y agoEverything else is getting cheaper, at an exponential rate, but nukes are getting more costly.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years We are forced into poorly built, unrepairable appliances through a market failure. Failure of consumers to spread the word about appliance repairability. Fraudulent forgery of consumer reviews by manufacturers. Failure of the housing market driving the repair technicians out if business - its cheaoer for someone in china to spend 10 hours building new washing machine than for someone in uk to spend 2 hours fixing it. In some cases, a deliberate subversion of the spare parts market by manufacturers. There is not a grand plan to improve efficiency and solve clinate change.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y agoSure, there’s not much incentive for manufacturers to develop reliable appliances, because people just shop based on price and features. Once of the only constraints is government regulations which ban the old, less efficient designs. Take away those regs, and manufacturers who don’t want to pay for R&D can churn out those simple designs again.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> because people just shop based on price and features But thats all they can do - suppose I want to fins out if a Samsung phone is more reliable than Fairphone or Huawei - how would I find out? Will their salesmen tell me the truth? would customer support? Does their marketing department publish mean time between failure or statistics for repair? There is very little hard data where anyone took thousands of appliances and measured their reliability.
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoPetrol burned in a car is energy, not electricity.
- dekken_ 4y agoThe fact that you can use combustion to generate electricity, means they are interchangeable. The other comment is probably more on point about conversion effeciency.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> that you can use combustion to generate electricity, means they are interchangeable This is an accounting issue, not a question of thermodynamics. Electricity typically refers to grid electric. We don’t count non plug-in hybrid electrical output as “electricity.” That’s how energy use can be stable while electrification increases.