As a society and individually, we use energy every moment of our lives to improve our quality of life. Energy 101 will develop the big picture and connect the details of our energy use, technology, infrastructure, impact, and future.
Course Overview
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來自 Georgia Institute of Technology 的課程
能源 101：概述
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Energy, Society and Economy
This module introduces the concepts of impact of energy issues on society, sources of energy, role of fossil fuels and issues of oil import
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Dr. Sam SheltonProfessor Emeritus
Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
Dr. Richard A. SimmonsSenior Research Engineer & Fellow
Strategic Energy Institute
Hello energy so let's take a big picture overview of what this course is about,
and what topics were going to cover, and why we need to look at them.
So energy in the news we see what the headlines
about the wildly fluctuating oil prices, oil doubling,
going up to $150, particularly in 2008 before the economy collapsed.
In fact, we'll look at some of the coupling between
the fact that the economy collapsed because the energy cost was,
oil cost in particular was putting such a burden on our economy.
We'll look at the Middle East geopolitical chaos and how that impacts us.
How much oil do we get out of the Middle East?
How does that impact it, and impact us, and
how does that impact the cost of our oil?
We hear that OPEC, as strong as they have been in the past,
that they're now irrelevant.
We'll see about how relevant that statement is.
We'll look at the US energy independence.
We hear a lot about we need to be independent in energy
from other countries in dependence.
However in 2014 we're importing about 40% of the oil.
Are we heading in the right direction?
Because we were importing as much as 65% of our oil from other countries.
And we'll look at emissions, and for instance, electric cars.
Do they really have zero emissions?
Most of the electric cars have an emblem on them that says zero emissions.
We'll look at the environmental impacts on things, and
look at some of those statements.
The impact of the dollars flowing out of the US because of imported oil,
we look at the importance of that and look at the facts regarding that.
National security, as I mentioned, the national security issue, of course,
is important, because if we're importing a lot of oil from a particular set of
countries and they decide to embargo us as the OPEC did back in the 70s,
it places us in a very difficult position.
What about oil and gas resource depletion?
We hear that we're running out of oil, we're running out of gas, but then we
develop fracking and that seems to say hey we got an infinite supply oil and
gas, and we'll have it as long as we want it ad infinitum.
We'll look at the laws of geology, and what they say to that question.
And we'll look at the new energy technologies.
I mentioned fracking, and how that's impact us.
We'll look at the developing solar technologies, and the cost of that.
That has dropped recently, making that much more favorable than it was.
We'll look at the impact of using our energy more efficiently and
what the economics of that is.
And essentially all of the environmental issues
stem from energy consumption, whether it's air pollution,
ground pollution, climate change, or water issues.
They all are energy-related.
If we could solve our energy question and energy problems, we would clean up
the environment, and not have to talk about environmental issues anymore.
So in a nutshell, let's look at course topics.
The topics that we'll cover is energy and society, and
the coupling between our society and how we live and the energy we use.
Energy in the economy.
How the energy sector impacts our economy,
how much it hurts us, how much it helps us.
We'll look at the sources of energy.
Where are we getting energy from?
Are we getting most of it from coal or are we getting most of it from imported oil?
Are we getting a lot of it from solar or wind or
nuclear and what's the trend on where we're getting our energy sources?
We'll look at how much, as I already mentioned how much energy we're importing.
And, energy is not all created equal, we'll find out, by the way.
Oil is not equal to natural gas.
There are many differences there.
We can't replace oil consumption tomorrow with natural gas, for instance.
We'll look at the pricing of energy, how the price is determined,
who determines it, what the mechanism's for determining it.
And we'll look at the new renewable energy sources.
What are those resources and how effectively can we capture them and
converted them into the forms that we want to use it.
We'll look at the physical laws of energy.
There's limitations in thermodynamics regarding
the laws of how to convert energy from one form to another form.
For instance, a barrel of oil sitting at home won't light the lights.
It won't heat it, it won't air condition it.
We've gotta have a conversion system to convert the energy in the form,
we get it out of the earth or
the wind or the solar into the from that we wanted to drive our computers,
to light out lights, to keep our house warm in the winter, or cool in the summer.
We'll look at the electric power technologies,
a lot of our energy that we use is in the form of electricity.
It's one of the most versatile forms of energy that we have.
And we'll look at those technologies and the trends that
is taking place there and how that's changing the landscape.
Transportation technology.
We're getting more and more efficient automobiles by 2025
the rules are in place to mandate that the average car that is
produced by any manufacturer has to get 55 miles per gallon.
That sounds like a very high goal, but
we'll look at how attainable that is.
We'll look at the energy efficiency and what that can do for us.
Just using the energy and
doing the things that we do with energy in a more efficient manner.
So those are the topics that we'll be covering.
So some of the conclusions that we'll reach in this course
that you might find interesting and to follow,
is that we'll see how energy is tightly coupled to our economy.
And I'll just leave it there, that there's a very tight coupling between
improving the economy and increasing the amount of energy that we consume.
National Security, we're pretty much familiar with that.
And how dependence on other countries for
our oil in particular puts us in a difficult position many times.
We'll learn some unusual things or
surprising things that you may not recognize at this point.
And but one is the fact that wind energy, solar energy, and
nuclear energy do not save any oil.
You may find that surprising, but in fact, it's just the fact that
putting in more wind energy, more solar energy, more nuclear energy to generate
electricity does not save any oil, which is our critical energy source.
Electric cars we'll find do not significantly reduce CO2 emissions,
in spite of the fact that many of them have the zero emissions badge on the back,
not today.
Theoretically it's possible but that's a hypothetical, and
if we want to do that then we need to plan to get to the point where electric cars do
have much lower emissions than our gasoline powered cars.
Which are on target to reach 55 miles a gallon in 2025.
And the last thing that you hear about most things And
that is there's no silver bullet solution to our energy issues.
So look forward to being with you and covering this material and
hope you enjoy it.
Thank you.
