1.21 gigawatts just not enough these days
So there’s been a bit of a hullabaloo recently, over how gadget-centric we’ve become as a species and whether more thought needs to go into electrical efficiency before we end up spending more money on leccy than porn. Experts have predicted electricity bills could rise by £100 per household.
Even the International Energy Agency’s in a flap, having recently published “Gadgets and Gigawatts -- Policies for Energy Efficient Electronics” which includes this scary graph indicating that we may well be using 1700 terawatt hours across the globe by 2030.
That's residential use only.
In the next seven months they have estimated 1 billion PCs and 2 billion TVs to be in use and over half the world’s populous owning a mobile phone.
There are plans in place to try and offset the huge amount of power we’re going to be using such as the 120 gigawatts of wind and solar power China plans to install by 2020 and that massive hot-air convection tower made out of Anne Coulter’s face. So there’s probably not too much to worry about on the “world failing over into electrical blackout” front.
But in the home and meantime, it’s probably wise to keep an eye on the electrics because those bills won’t stop rising until we can harvest free gigawatts out of clouds like Doc Brown.
TOPICS: Utilities
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