Our planet is rich in energy. Enough energy simply falls on the planet from the sun in 40 minutes to supply all of our needs for a year. We are running out of several forms of energy at present, hence the discussion of ‘peak oil’ and the like. Energy produced from oil, gas, coal and other natural resources has reached its ‘peak’ – supplies are dwindling while our need for energy is increasing to work our homes, our transport and our industries.
You might think that with all this energy falling from the sun, tidal power, wind power and other renewable sources that the solution to our energy problems would be easy – simply switch over. The problem is that vested interest has kept the development of alternatives ‘quiet’ over the last 25 years or so. We are not ready to switch yet as the technologies are not where they need to be. Even James Lovelock, instigator of the Gaia hypothesis, an alternative theory about life on earth, suggests that in the short term we will have to rely on increased nuclear power to feed our expensive energy habits.
Mostly our homes run on 240 volt systems whereas many of our devices can now run on 12volts – certainly lighting technology is easily able to run at this lower energy requirement. Look around the house and I expect you will find a plethora of devices running at 15, 12, 9, 6, 4.5, even three volts – all with ugly black plastic transformers to ramp the supply down enough. But rewiring our homes and devices to run on 12 volts is too huge a job – unless we voluntarily undertake it as individuals. This means that some of high power devices – kettles, washing machines, dryers and so on will not work (yet).
The decentralisation of energy supply is another issue in the economies of energy. The power that pays for governments often comes from large industry; centralised monopolies are a large part of the capitalism that runs our economy. Harvesting our own energy supplies ‘from the wild’ still runs counter to the interests of a culture based on ‘consuming’ what is supplied to them in order to create a money stream.
Planning regulations in many areas disallow windmills on domestic properties. While this is certainly reasonable it is a disincentive to invest for many people. Add to this a lack of regulation and standardisation and it becomes easy to see why slowing down global warming by diminishing our energy supplies is more complex than it looks.
The oft (mis)quoted ‘Nobody changes until the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of change’ would seem to apply to our energy habits in the Western World. But this quote is evidently for people who’s lives know only pain. Many people are happily changing to a new economy of energy that goes way beyond physics. Many people are discovering the joys of frugalism in which the responsible use of our resource of energy is just one aspect of walking gently on the face of the earth.
