Deasil Energy     information and consultancy

Introduction

Energy is everything. This is true whether one is viewing a website in the developed or developing world, whether cooking dinner is a matter of turning on a microwave or walking ten kilometres to fetch wood, and all points between. Energy is everything. If anyone doubts this statement, feel free to imagine a single action that does not use energy in some form; food, food production, water, water purification, chemical and material manufacturing, transport, heat, light. Life.

Our existing global energy systems cannot hope to provide enough energy for everyone; as for equitable distribution? Forget it.

There isn't enough fossil energy to go around, and what fossil energy remains will run out at some point. Taking as a premise that it would be a good idea for everyone on the planet to have access to clean water, sufficient food, heat, light and transport, this lack of fossil resource means moving towards global sustainable energy systems. The following sections and their associated pages don't dare to suggest how this might come about; they are in place to provide information about the past, the present and possibilities for the future of energy.

But first... How to save cash and insulate people

For people in the UK, and the developed world it in general, energy is very much about 'magic' - we flip the switch, pump the fuel and then grumble about how much it costs. Simple, if increasingly expensive. This page gives some ideas about how to reduce that expense. It's simple, non-technical, and requires little - if any - outlay.

Global problems, local solutions... If you can invest

Local energy - community and household energy, can - if done properly - make a lot of financial sense. There are grants and interest free loans available. Learn more here. To a certain extent this is a plug for the services of Deasil Energy, but having said that take your time and make your own choices.

Global problems, global solutions

Deasil Energy has a look at some of the issues in the global energy economy. Deasil Energy is based in Scotland, so there is a UK slant to this information, especially since sustainable energy systems have to be appropriate to their locality. Fortunately there are a multiplicity of technologies that can apply to any locality.

Some quick definitions:

• Primary energy is energy in its raw state - e.g. crude oil, coal, waves
• Secondary energy is processed energy - e.g. petrol, electricity
• Delivered energy is what you actually use - e.g. a car's power, light from a bulb, heat from a fire
• Efficiency is about delivering energy without wasting it

Very broadly speaking, the human race has succeeded when it has been able to increase its standard of living by means of using increasing amounts of resources ever more ingeniously. The philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau would have argued that civilisation is not the natural or happiest state of mankind, but since he chose to live in a comfortable cottage and be visited by nobility rather than living in a tree while eating berries he can, perhaps, be safely ignored on this particular occasion.

In 1968 American environmentalist Paul Ehrlich created an equation that could very roughly be used to forecast the environmental impact of using resources, showing that it can be predicted by multiplying the size of population, the level of affluence and the technological efficiency of resource use:

I = PxAxT

It's useful in energy work - affluent countries use more energy, countries concerned with the price of energy tend to use it more efficiently, and the bigger the population the more energy is used overall.

This type of study goes back a lot further. English demographer Thomas Malthus, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, started to debate what would happen when humanity reached the limit, or carrying capacity, of any given resource, in his case particularly of food. Although his maths was questionable his conclusion was correct. Logically, reaching such a limit would lead to cooperation – the application of ingenuity which could extend the resource or manage its equitable use – or what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes would have described as a ‘war of all against all’. Charles Darwin noted that conflict within a species over resources is one of the main drivers which will keep a population in check. Humanity, as Malthus pointed out, does have a capacity for cooperation which allows us to prevent conflict, but there are many instances where cooperation has failed and nations and groups of nations have gone to war over resources.

Conflict (or necessary cooperation) over resources is directly linked to population. If developing economies follow the population trends that the developed economies have shown (as is happening in China at the moment) then world population should stabilise at around ten to twelve billion people by the end of the century. This would suggest an energy requirement - depending on World Energy Council scenario – between approximately two and five times present energy consumption. Given that when world population doubled between 1950 and 2000 energy consumption increased by a factor of six, the statistics are not encouraging. Further, the upper suggested limits of these statistics are the ones which are most likely. People in developing countries want access to the same goods and transport which have made developed countries so intensive in their energy use, and remaining fossil energy resources will not support this. When fossil reserves near levels of peak production we not only lose cheap energy and transport, we lose cheap plastics and consumer goods.

Unsustainable energy sources: digging for fossils

Almost all of the energy that humanity presently uses comes from oil, coal, gas and their derivatives. The planet has plenty of reserves, unfortunately that isn't the only issue. Learn more here.

Three hundred words to sustain the world

This page is what it's all about, where it all began. A single section from a lecture given by an eminent Scots biologist, some three hundred words long: why energy sustainability is a necessity, and how it might be accomplished.

Sustainable energy sources: glowing in the dark

Nuclear fission is sustainable, under certain circumstances. Learn more about fission energy sources and technology here.

Sustainable energy sources: hot rocks; spinning rocks

By clicking above or here, you can find information about geothermal and tidal energy.

Sustainable energy sources: Mr Fusion; or how to build a flying DeLorean

(flux capacitor not included)

Sustainable energy sources: sunshine

Humanity already has a very efficient working fusion reactor at its disposal - the Sun. Find out more about how we can harness energy from this reactor here.