The energy around you

By Roger Diamond

I woke up this morning and quietly got dressed in the darkness of the bedroom, with the still, cool, winter pre-dawn lurking outside. I walked through to the kitchen and effortlessly flicked on the light switch. Then, in the bathroom, with another easy twist, pressurised and purified water came flowing out of the tap. Back in the kitchen, I opened a cupboard to see food gleefully staring back at me waiting to be eaten, selected some maize meal, added water, slapped the pot on the stove, turned the knob and lit up the gas that flickered with the blue flame of decayed marine creatures from millions of years ago.

Within minutes of waking up, my life was empowered by energy. In so many different forms, stored in different ways, we often don’t see the energy in all of these things. That food in the cupboard had to be grown, nurtured, watered, probably sprayed with chemicals, harvested, processed, transported and finally sold. All of these steps use energy and much of it, non-renewable, finite energy, largely fossil fuels with just a hint of nuclear (3% in South Africa to be precise). This is excluding the sunshine that made the plants grow and drove the water from the oceans to form rain and blow inland. We still, as much as we are dependent upon our technological energy, are more dependent upon the natural energy flows that stem directly from the sun and the Earth.

Think of all the ways in which energy is critical to your life. As this is an online posting, you will be reading it from a computer, which uses energy, and the server that stores this piece of writing, will be using energy. Computing may be low on paper consumption (although this is highly arguable) but the energy required to keep data centres alive and to power every person’s personal computer is becoming a significant fraction of our society’s energy usage. And this is not because other energy uses are declining, but rather because this new type of energy consumption is growing so fast.

So my message in this short, initial posting is for you to think about energy in your life, and specifically to think about how you use energy now, compared with many years ago. Are there new appliances that you never used to have? Do you use certain appliances more? Do you travel more? How often do you replace clothing, furniture and other items that have all used energy to be produced? Extrapolate this trend into the future to see that our demand will continue to increase and remember that most of this technological energy is coming from non-renewable resources. Think about it.

Until next time.