It has been a while since I posted, actually over a month. I was on a roll with the led lighting, but I am kind of waiting and looking at things for a while. I continue to use the bulbs that I have bought and the one over the sink at my fiancees house is working good so far.
There are a couple of websites that I wanted to direct people to:
Bill Gates has given some talks about energy and is looking at the world of sustainable and renewable energy. His site has some very good links. The other site is a book that was recommended by Bill Gates. The book was written by David MacKay, Sustainable Energy – without the hot air. It is a free book that can be read online (found at http://www.withouthotair.com/) and it is a very good way of looking at energy usage. I particularly like the way he boils down personal energy usage to the equivalent of kilowatt hours which he explains can be visualized as the following:
1 kilowatt-hour = one 40 watt light bulb turned on for one year
In my job, I travel quite a bit by air. In looking at air travel and the energy usage that I use per year, it is quite scary and not sustainable. I think the most amazing thing from the book and air travel is the following paragraph, which I have copied directly:
A Boeing 747-400 with 240 000 litres of fuel carries 416 passengers about
8 800 miles (14 200 km). And fuel’s calorific value is 10 kWh per litre. (We
learned that in Chapter 3.) So the energy cost of one full-distance roundtrip
on such a plane, if divided equally among the passengers, is
| 2 × 240 000 litre
______________________ |
× 10 kWh/litre ≈ 12 000 kWh per passenger |
| 416 passengers |
If you make one such trip per year, then your average energy consumption
per day is
| 12 000 kWh | ≈ 33 kWh/day |
| _____________________
365 days |
So based on what the author of the book says and if I kind of work out a recent flight that I took, Seattle to Oakland, CA a little over 600 miles, and the plane was probably 80% full, a 737-700 gets a little over 40 mpg per passenger or about 0.43 mpg for the plane. So to move me to Oakland and back I used about 1100 kilowatt hours, or I turned on 3 40 watt light bulbs for a year. Doesn’t look like much until you consider that there are thousands of flights a day all over the world.
Even more amazing and scary, we recently went to an event at Boeing and one of the displays showed all of the airplanes in the sky during different hours of the day around the world. At one point, there were over 13,000 commercial big planes in the air at one time. Makes you wonder how long we can continue like this. I guess that is enough for now, more to come.
