The book Earth: The Operators’ Manual is written by geosciences professor Richard Alley and is associated with the PBS series of the same name. The book is split into three sections. The first section briefly describes the history of global energy usage. The second part discusses the scientific evidence behind global warming. The third section of the book was the one I was most interested in. It describes alternative energy strategies and conservation techniques that could save the environment. The book is endorsed by Dr. Richard Muller, who wrote Physics for Future Presidents and leads the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project.
Here are some notes from the third section of the book:
• A study by William Nordhaus of Yale University estimates that a low-cost zero-carbon technology would have a value of $17 trillion.
• Renewable energy, energy efficiency, carbon capture and storage, and nuclear energy all generate more jobs than fossil-fuel sources.
• Modern human energy use worldwide is about 16 terawatts combined.
• A modern wind turbine generates as much energy in about three months as is required to build, install, maintain, and discard it over its thirty-year lifetime.
• The average power production from one big wind turbine is equivalent to the total energy use in the U.S. economy for more than 100 people.
• Additional transmission costs only added 10 to 20 percent to the total price for constructing a wind project.
• The fluctuations associated with generating 50 percent of U.S. electricity demand from wind could be managed if 3 percent of all vehicles bought and sold electricity through a smart grid.
• Building wind farms to replace fossil fuels might reduce bird deaths by avoiding the loss of habitat caused by strip-mining.
• The costs to society (in terms of environmental damage) are probably more than twice as large as the cost paid by customers for generating the electricity from coal.
• The entire world energy demand could be supplied from solar panels placed in a square area of 500 miles on each side.
• Genetic engineering might make tobacco viruses capable of growing solar cells.
• The “Passivhaus” building standard in Germany reduces wintertime heating costs by 90 percent through the use of solar heating.
• Project Surya is a project to supply sun-powered ovens to people in India.
• Tidal energy and ocean thermal energy conversion could provide natural sources of power.
• Sugar cane grown in tropical or subtropical regions seems to produce biofuel much more efficiently than other plant sources.
• A report from MIT estimated that the energy stored in hot rock beneath the United States above a depth of 6 miles is equivalent to 130,000 years of U.S. human energy use at modern rates.
• LEDs are eight to ten times more efficient than incandescent bulbs.
• Putting wind farms on the windiest 20 percent of the plains and deserts of the world would supply more than the current worldwide human energy use. The turbines could be constructed over thirty years for a worldwide cost less than the current U.S. energy expenditure.
• In the long term (several decades in the future), most energy experts seem to be contrasting a successful sun-wind economy with a disastrous exhaustion of fossil fuels in a hard-to-handle greenhouse world. Many plans foresee wiring the sun-wind economy through a smart electrical grid, with an energy-storage system that might include batteries of plug-in hybrid cars, or hydrogen, or some other liquid fuel made from recaptured carbon dioxide.
