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Pat,
At least he didn't say something like 50 TW per year as
you might find in some reports. Which would mean that each year the world
would need an additional 50 TW.
I think many times people associate power with force and
the word energy with electricity and heat or the fuels needed to produce it,
rather then their physics definition.
They approach the measurement dilemma the same way
everyone else does. The use a hodgepodge. Doing a Google search on
"end of oil" and "peak oil" should lead you to web sites that when you view them
should give you a sample of what measurement units are used.
My bet is that if they are American in origin, you will
see a hodgepodge of units. As long as the Americans control the world oil
supply, this will continue.
This site, the first from the Google search: http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
completely uses American units. I didn't read it thoroughly, but a quick
glace came up with barrels, gallons, miles and pounds. You may wish to
write the author about his information being limited to 5 % of the world's
population and see if he re-writes his article.
The end of oil is an international problem, but American
authors of articles don't seem to try to get the message out to the world in the
units the world uses. They also treat US gas prices in dollar's per gallon
as some reference that everyone can relate too. Three dollar gas or ten
dollar gas is suppose to mean something to everyone, but it doesn't. On
the other hand with the American economy 100 % subsidized by the petrodollar one
can see where the Americans are the most concerned.
You may be the right person to educate the people that if
they want to get global attention to their cause they have to speak to the world
in measurement units they understand. Metric dominates and it is metric
units that must be used to get the message across.
Dan
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, 2005-10-22 03:39
Subject: [USMA:34965] Energy or
power
Dear
All,
Recently, I was reading Paul Roberts' book, 'The End of Oil' when
I came across this paragraph:
More broadly, this trend helps us see why energy
experts get so anxious when they begin calculating how the world is going to
power itself over the next century. By most estimates, assuming that
projections for future energy demand and population growth hold true - and
that we maintain our current disdain for energy efficiency - by the year
2100, the world's ten billion people will need something on the order of
fifty terawatts of electricity, or around four times what we produce today.
That is a staggering amount of power. Generating it would require an energy
infrastructure far larger and costlier than any that exists today, and it
raises questions about not only the adequacy of our energy supplies, but the
quality of that energy. By some estimates, given the slow success and low
power densities of nonhydrocarbon energy technologies, we would not be able
to meet all this new demand without using a lot of fossil fuels, which we've
no way to ensure that we can burn cleanly. In other words, our unwillingness
to take energy efficiency seriously enough to reduce demand may make it
flat-out impossible to stay within any sort of reasonable carbon budget.
The End of Oil, Paul Roberts, Mariner Books
2005, p 223
In this single paragraph Roberts uses the word,
'energy' 8 times, and the word 'power' 3 times. Each time he used either of
these words, I had to stop reading to decide whether he used these words
correctly or, as is so common in everyday media stories, as though energy and
power were interchangeable words with the same meaning.
To a
metrologist, a physicist, or an engineer energy and power are quite different
quantities altogether and they shouldn't be muddled. As these folk
know:
energy is the ability to do work and it is measured in joules,
and
power is the rate at which energy is used and it is measured in
watts.
My concern over this apparently simple matter is that books like
Paul Roberts' are beginning to be debated all around the world and many
commentators are not at all clear what energy and power are and how they
differ from each other.
Can anyone tell me how they approach this
measurement dilemma?
Cheers and thanks,
Pat Naughtin
Geelong,
Australia
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