Reasonable estimates suggest that world wide fossil fuel production will dwindle to 10% of its current values in the next 40 years. Accelerated fossil fuel dependence in India and China will only serve to shorten, perhaps dramatically, this depletion timescale. Currently, 89% of the world's energy generating capacity is fossil fuel dependent. Thus, optimistically, we have about 40 years left to move from a fossil fuel based energy economy to a sustainable energy economy. Emerging technologies such as solar photovoltaic cells, improved wind turbines, advanced gas turbines, hydrogen fuel cells, efficient biomass co-generation facilities, improved energy storage capacity in batteries, and ocean thermal electric conversion heat engines, offer us a wide array of choices for alternative means to derive energy. Yet each of these new forms of energy generation has a different environmental and ecological impact in terms of material and land usage and thus this array of choices needs to be evaluated objectively and fairly.
Week 1 Content: The price of gas and energy awareness; Refinery limited crude oil supplies; the earth limited scale; Sustainability and the UO; megawatts, terrawatts and joe sixpack; Overview of US Electricity Production
Week 2 Content:Basics of Electricity; Introduction to Google Earth; Generation and distribution of electricity; Transmission infrastructure; Find the western coal mines;
Week 3 Content: Levelized Costs; Introduction to wind energy, worldwide wind potential and wind farms; regional wind potentials;
Dot War Basics:
A planets geographical distribution of population may strongly determine how culture evolves. Consider two cases, which are shown in this simulation: Case 1: Equality: Cultures are distributed across many small islands with little chance for connectivity. Case 2: Cancer: Planet has one large land mass but starts out with isolated "island" cultures. However, since there is connectivity one culture can eventually dominate.