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7.4 Renewable Energy: Energy efficiency and conservation - Coggle Diagram
7.4 Renewable Energy:
Energy efficiency and conservation
Why transition?
Burning fossil fuels damages the environment
There's benefits for us both economically and environmentally. For example less burning of fossil fuels, less air pollution, less people with health issues
Economical benefits: opens a whole new market with a whole lot of new jobs
How to transition?
Improving energy effciciency and conservation
usually eficiency deals with unavoidable loss of energy conversion
conservation deals with avoidable energy loss, basically using your energy wisely
84% of all energy in the US is lost because of energy inefficiencies and misuse of energy, that's a lot of energy
How?
These all apply to powerplants
recycle materials
cogeneration
Basically using the waste of a powerplant to power another
use variable speed in motors in powerplants
Reduce the use of fossil fuels
This will no be an easy process and even in 2065 fossil fuels will still make up 50% of our energy
upgrade the 100 year old electricity grid of the United States which will be extremely costly but will yield a lot of profits
Transportation
Combustion motor cars are the norm but are also harmful to the environment and very inefficient despite advances made to improve them. Here's how to fix that
Improve public transportation
For example in Europe there's "high pollution days" where they detect abnormally high levels of air pollution(i still don't understand how) so they offer public transport passes at a cheaper price to encourage people to live their cars at home and use the public transport
invest in EVs
While they have their problems they are still fairly new and are already more efficient than fuel cars.Here's some of the problems (Note that they will be fixed with time and further development of these technologies)
charging stations are not widely available just yet
making the batteries still makes the car release CO2 in an indirect way biut that's just inevitable
Lithium ion batteries degrade and are expensive to manufacture
bycicle only lanes on the streets
Buildings
There are many ways to improve energy efficiency at home
using white star certified electrodomestics
or just generally using more efficient electrodomestics and more efficient
Improve home insulation
less heat comes in in the summer, less cold comes in the winter
improve the design of houses to be more energy efficient
green roofs, insulating windows, clay and silt, etc.