[SOUND] Hi, my name is Tom Murphy.

I'm a professor in the physics department

at UC-San Diego, and today we're going to talk about energy past, present,
future, with a particular emphasis on the numbers. And when it comes to numbers,
I advocate a
real flexibility with numbers, and rounding and just sort of a, a loose manipula
tion, because math is a lot
easier. If you don't take numbers so seriously and
some people laugh when I say that, but it's, it's really true that
math is easier, division is easier, multiplication is easier if you can manipula
te the numbers into something
that you can do in your head, then you can
quickly understand the scale. Have a problem rather something can work
or not work without getting bugged on the
details. So, for the instance the number pi and
three are virtually the same thing. And ten over three and square root of ten,
all about the same. So, you can simplify a lot of otherwise complicated math, ju
st by being flexible
and so. For instance, you can round a year to 30
million seconds. You don't need to know that it's 31.55
million to do something useful. Likewise, the US population is something
like 300 million people. Forget the fact that it might be 308 one
year and 310 the next, whatever. It's about 300 so, for example, the US
uses something like 20 million barrels of oil
per day. Now, if you have 300 million people using 20 million barrels of oil per
day, that's
a pretty simple division problem and you
come up with 15 days per person per barrel of oil. So a person goes through a ba
rrel of oil
in about 15 days. And so, if you think about having a barrel of oil delivered to
your house once every
15 days. That's somewhat staggering and puts things
in perspective. But oil is only about a third of our total
energy demand. So you can scale that again simple math,
now it's five days to go through the equivalent energy
contained in one barrel of oil. So how much energy is that? Well depends on what
units you like. Whether you like, gigajoules or joules or
BTUs or [UNKNOWN] all are units of energy. But, you know, comes out to six, giga
joules, 6,000,000,000 joules,
6,000,000 BTUs, 1,700 kilowatt-hours. And this is a very important point, if you
divide energy by time, that's called
power. And the units for power are watts. So if you take one watt is one joule p
er
second. So if you take six gigajoules, and divide
by how many seconds are in five days, you end up with about 10,000
joules per second, or 10,000 watts. That's a rate at which we go through
energy. That's not watts per second. That's already a rate And that's a 24
seven constant draw of power that each American
is responsible for. Now, we'll come back to putting that in
perspective. And for now, I just want to point out. If you take 10,000 watts or
ten Kilowatts,
multiply it by 24 hours, you get 240 kilowatt hours
per day. So, 240 kilowatt hours, that's now an energy cause it's a power, ten ki
lowatts
times a time, in hours, so, that's how many
energy units we use per day as Americans. So, just to put 10,000 watts into
perspective. Imagine two clothes dryers running full
time. They run at about 5,000 watts. Or, you could have, pick your appliance, ha
irdryers microwave ovens, toaster ovens,
space heaters. They all run at about 1,700 watts and
that's actually not a coincidence. That's because household circuits are

usually rated at 15 or 20 amps and so they're kind of maxing

out. What a typical outlet can handle. So they're all about 1700 watts, you need
about six of those running full time to make
10,000 watts. Here's an interesting one, a human that
can, who consumes about 2,000 calories per day that turns out 2,000 calories is
a
unit of power per day. Sorry, 2,000 calories is a unit of energy. Per day that t
urns into watts, and it
turns out to be 100 watts. So a human runs at about 100 watts. You need 100 huma
ns to make 10,000 watts. That's basically saying that we have 100
energy slaves working for us in America to do the things that we need to get don
e, so
that's quite a work force. You could also have 20-watt laptops. You'd need 500 o
f those CFL bulbs running
at 14 watts. You'd need about 700 of those. Cell phones charging. Maybe five wat
ts to charge a cell phone so you'd need 2,000 of those to make up
10,000 watts. Or, an idle charger might be drawing about
one watt, so you'd need 10,000 of those. So that, hopefully, puts 10,000 watts i
nto
perspective. That's what each of us is responsible for. Now if you know anything
about your
electricity bill, you might say 240 kilowatt hours a day is an
awful lot. And you'd be right because if you look at
a typical American household, the household uses
about 35 kilowatt hours per day. Okay. That's not a whole lot compared to 240,
but we do have to keep in mind that. The primary energy it takes to come up with
35 kilowatt hours of delivered
energy, it requires 95 kilowatt hours of primary energy from coal [INAUDIBLE] nu
clear or
whatever else. So okay and natural gas it's also about 35
kilowatt hours a day usually the gas bill is in
therms. So that looks a little bit different, but,
you can always convert units between each other if
you need to. A typical household uses about three
gallons of gas a day, each gallon has about 36 kilo watt hours,
contained in it in energy. So that's a little over 100 kilo watt
hours in gasoline. Add all those up you've got about 235 kilo
watt hours a day, and it sounds like we've reached our 240, but not so fast beca
use a household contains more
than one person. So when you work it all out it comes out
to about 95 kWh/day per person spent in the
home or personal vehicle. Ok, that's just 40% of the total, so
where's all the rest? Well we have a huge infrastructure
Supporting our lifestyle. We have industry, we have agriculture
growing our food, transportation to move things all around to our stores,
to each other. We have the consumer and commercial world. We have defense and go
vernment. All those things take energy. All of that happens outside of our
household. And, but I think that it's important to
realize that it all happens on our behalf. Our standard of living demands that w
e
have these things happening, and so we really have to take
responsibility for all that energy. And also realize that almost all of it comes
from fossil fuels, which are finite
in nature. If you've never looked at it, the Energy
Information Agency puts out every year an annual energy review
This is from 2011, and they have some nice graphs where you see
pictorially how much comes from domestic fossil fuel, how much
comes from imported fossil fuel. Here's nuclear and here's renewable, mostly hyd
roelectric and some burning
wood. And then where it goes, residential,

commercial, industrial, transportation. They also have some nice diagrams that
sort of detail where, which things go to where. So 71% of petroleum goes to
transportation, but you can ask the inverse question, say that
transportation gets 93% of its energy from petroleum, or nuclear power,
100% of it goes to making electricity, but electricity is
pretty diverse, 21% comes from nuclear. So a lot of great information on this ki
nd
of spider web. Diagram. So, one point I want to make that's very
important to me, is that, we live in a very special time and place,
here in America at this age. Prior to now, we used muscle and firewood
to get our energy. And then we found fossil fuels, and an
incredibly. Ramped up our energy production to a huge level, and we're near the
top of the
finite. We know fossil fuels are finite. We're near to the top of this curve. Wh
at happens out here, nobody knows. Anybody who tells you they know, you can't
trust them, because we don't, it's not a
scripted future. So, I think it's very important to keep
this perspective that we're living in a very
special time. All the growth that we've seen is highly dependent on this surge i
n fossil fuel
energy. So now let's put things in perspective
globally. We have we've seen in the US 10,000 watts per person, that's ten to th
e fourth
watts. If you multiply by the number of people,
300 million people in the U.S, you get three times ten to the
12 watts. Or three [??]. So, that's the power usage of the US. The US is 20% of
the world, global energy
demand. So, you multiply by five to get 15
terawatts. And I'll note that US uses 20% of the
global energy with less than 5% of the world population,
so think about that. So 15 terawatts for the entire world. If our dream, as stat
ed by many, is to have ten billion people, which are
coming, live at US or Western standards, that implies
something like 100 terrawatts of power necessary to make
that happen. And so, that makes the fossil fuel look
like an absolute tiny blip. And we have all this energy coming from presumably r
enewables to last you know,
for the millennia. And it's not clear what makes us think we
can do this. There's no precedent for it. So, let's just look at some of the
renewables and what we can get. So, solar power reaching land comes up to
a staggering 20,000 terawatts. And, even if you have all kinds of
practical limitations, you could probably easily get hundreds of terawatts
out of solar, if you had to. So, that looks pretty promising. But take the next
step down and we look at
the entire biological activity on Earth, all
organisms from plankton to elephants. We're looking at 60 terawatts or there
about. And how much of that can we commandeer for
our own energy needs? How much of the world can we basically
enslave to satisfy our energy needs. Not all of it, presumably. So five or ten t
erawatts might be
reasonable. The wind resources, fairly similar, five
or ten terawatts. And then it goes down from there, so if
you look at what you need To get 100 terawatt
scale. Solar is really the only renewable
resource that is obvious, that can do the job. Nuclear is also interesting, but
it's not
technically renewable. Does mine things out of the ground, and
has a finite lifetime. So, but there's more to the story than
just the abundance. Because you can look at different aspects
of energy resources. You can look at the abundance, the

difficulty, the intermittency. Is it a demonstrated technology? Can it fuel elec

tricity? Provide heat? Or fuel transportation, is it publicly acceptable, nuclea
r has some trouble
there. Can you put it in your backyard and how
efficient is it. And when you look at all of these things
together and score them, red are bad things, and yellow, intermediate
and blue are good, aspects across all those. across all those categories for the
different types of alternative energies and end up all the
scores. You end up with something like, one to
five, whereas fossil fuels tend to be eight of ten of
these points. So there is a big gap between the the
benefits of fossil fuels and if it were for the
fact that fossil fuels are finite in creating
in creating a lot of greenhouse gases, we wouldn't be
worried about this. If you want more detail in this, go to my
blog, do the math, look at the alternative energy matrix, you can
see lot more detail in how this is
constructed. So the lesson for me is that this makes me
sit up and pay attention because we're in an all
hands on deck situation. We have a, an energy demand that's huge, and continuati
on of this under
alternatives is not guaranteed. We don't know for sure that we can make
this work. There are problems and issues in the way. That suggests we need to ta
ckle this with a research effort that dwarfs everything
we've ever seen. You know, Apollo-scale project, Manhattan
project, Should look tiny compared to what we need to do to respond to this ener
gy
crisis of the future. So, but we don't know even if we do a lot of research, we'
re not going to
guarantee that, that's going to work. So, we also are wise to think about ways
to trim down, use less energy this way. So personally at home, I've reduced my
energy footprint by about four or five times, and I still live a Western
lifestyle more or less. And so you can do that, but it's not just
at home. Your consumer choices matter. So, how often and where you travel, what
you eat, you know, meat for instance, costs a lot of energy How can
you buy things or replace things? How can you wash your clothes? All those thing
s matter. And those are choices. So, be a friend to us all, turn off a hair drye
r or two and we'll all breath a
lot easier.