My Union Station

More Energy, Better Energy Delivery

There's an interesting article in the February 2005 Discover Magazine about energy consumption. In recent postings I've made some attempt to address this issue from a consumption side and only from the perspective of the use of advance lighting technologies.

The Discover article is an interview with Noble prize winning chemist Rick Smalley entitled "A Chemist's Plan to Save Planet Earth". The article's focus is on the generation and consumption of power. It does offer some insight to a few ideas about how we could transmit power more efficiently and therefore produce power in more remote areas, perhaps with solar energy if that technology becomes a viable option. The article also promotes the use of nuclear energy as an option for meeting future needs and thereby eliminate green house gas production from the burning of fossil fuels.

However, the article doesn't paint a rosy picture about the future for an energy hungry population. The article brings up an interesting statistic about the consumption of countries, such as China and explains how these countries will outstrip the resources and then effect the entire world economy.

In my blog "LED Use on a Grand Scale" I discussed the power savings of replacing just traffic lighting with LED's. 2.7 billion kW isn't on the grand scale of terawatts quoted in the discover article, but it is a savings we can't afford to ignore. IF we made the switch from incandescent technologies to LED's we could in effect shutdown thousands of coal fired plants in use across the U.S. If we further switched our use of lighting technologies in the use of LED's we could realize event greater reductions in power consumption.

This isn't the final answer, but it is a very likely starting point to becoming less consuming and more efficient with the energy we have. Think about it. We're still using incandescent technologies from Thomas Edison's day. Yes they are more efficient but, still for energy consumed to usable light output we're only talking 10% efficiency. A compact fluorescent bulb is about 40% efficient making it a far better choice.

An LED equivalent replacement is about 95% efficient in turning power consumed into usable light. The average office building in the U.S. uses about 25% of the power consumed for lighting. The savings would enormous if we converted to using LED lighting technologies.

Yes we need to find better ways to generate and transmit electricity, but we need to get serious about saving it too.

posted by vjpfire @ 11:54 AM