2000-Watt Society
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
As the Wikipedia article highlights, the average Swiss uses about 5kW (that's 5kWh per hour), of which only about 10% are electricity.
Similarly, about 10% are car usage, or about 0.5kW. If we take the average car to develop on average 50kW, and assume an efficiency of 1 (for the sake of the argument), then they use a car around 1% of the time or about 15 minutes a day (less if efficiency is <1, as it is).
ETA some more reference points:
A human eats around 10,000kJ per day = 86400 seconds, let's call it 100,000s, so 10,000kJ/100ks = 100J/s = 100W, about as much as a bright lightbulb (the old fashioned ones, not LED).
The sun gives us about 1kW of power per square meter. Say photovoltaic cells have an efficiency of 10%, and the sun shines 6 hours a day (=25%), then we are talking around 25W/m².
So, the average Swiss uses the energy corresponding to about 50 people working for him or 200m² of PV, the average US citizen of 120 people or 480m² (5000 sq feet), and the goal here is to push it down to 20 people or 80m² PV.
Great reference: the books by Vaclav Smil, eg. How the World Really Works.
I drove a 2018 Chevy Bolt EV 12,000 miles per year on average for four years (totaled it this past Memorial Day weekend). Never got stranded/ran out of juice. Plenty of fast charging (55kW doesn't even reach 1 C (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_charger#C-rate) so I can basically fast charge with no concern for my long-term battery health), plenty of slow charging (1kW on my home 120V EVSE), 60kWh was more than enough for trips to Montréal, Vermont, and Chicago (from Philadelphia) over those four years.
Even looking at long range teslas they don't have enough juice to make it past stretches of chargerless road going from Texas to Colorado to visit friends, even before the losses from having to drive uphill.
Say no more - I totally understand the situation you're in and a Chevy Bolt EV would obviously not fit your needs.
Literally I packed the car, hit the listen button, and said "Navigate to Denver, Colorado".
Is any route from Texas to Colorado really have less charging than Wyoming (the least populated state)? I found 20+ superchargers between Houston and Denver. Even with a family of 3, dog, packed car, and bikes on the back I had no problems with Sacramento -> Denver, only in the most deserted stretches of Wyoming did I need anywhere close to half of my range.
I looked for the sparsest charging and it does indeed look like it's Wyoming, it's 360 miles from east to west and has 5 super chargers on 80. Judging by eye the longest stretch is Rock Springs WY to Rawlins WY and that's only 108 miles.
Even on Secondary highways that don't show up at the state level maps there's charger stations in Wichita Falls TX, Childress TX, Amarillo TX, Clayton NM, and Trinidad CO. From there Salida (West 147 miles) or Colorado Springs (North 130 miles) will get you to the rest of the state. Salida to Montrose (130 miles) gets you to west slope. Keep in mind elevation doesn't hurt that much, and while I have gotten a bit worried when I'm at under 60% climbing to a 14k foot peak, I was very surprised to end up with over 80% once I descended again.
This is all just using the Telsa charging network, there's many other places to charge as well.
Looks like Dallas (with 10 ish chargers) to Henrietta (134 miles), 127 miles to Childress, 117 miles to Amarillo, 132 miles to Clayton, and 104 miles to Trinidad. Depending on which Tesla you have you could likely skip half of those stops or so. The model 3 LR has a range of 358 miles, but most like to keep 10-15% in reserve.
One nice thing about EVs is that they are crazy efficient, so most of the losses are wind resistance, which is the square of speed. So you get 1.3x the range going from 75 mph to 65 mph. Another 1.4x going from 65 mph to 55 mph. So if things are dire you can extend the range significantly. The record is around 600 miles range if you have the patience for driving at 20-30mph.
While driving the car watches your progress and gives update coaching you about how much battery you'll have at the next charger or destination, and things like "staying below X MPH will get you there with 15% battery left".
For something like a Standard Range Tesla Model 3 where you have around 260 miles of range when charged to full you don't really need to make any different life decisions w.r.t daily routine or even longer distance travel. I think the main problem is affordability right now there. But EVs that satisfy basically all of someone's need have been in the market for years.
Though the real change needs to be in using cars for daily needs in the first place.
I mean, this is completely false if you are someone who doesn’t mind a little discomfort (which seems to becoming rapidly uncommon).
When I was in my early 20s many Fridays saw me leaving for an all-night 500+ mile drive(one drive I did several times was 900 miles) to visit my friends at university.
Even recently, when I go backpacking I typically drive non-stop many hundreds of miles.
Also consider that if most of your driving is not road trips, EVs save time compared to gas cars. You plug the car in when you get home and wake up with a full tank, so to speak.
A mediocre one will, à good one will do ~4-4.2, especially if you don’t drive at 80mph/130kph.
That's the information people new to EVs need to know - the fact that efficiency goes up when conditions are better is gravy.
If I saw 3.0, I'd be looking for the flat tire or a checkered flag.
In other words if you drive it faster than 5 mph in ideal conditions you're losing energy. If you drive it at 40 mph the solar panels are basically irrelevant. The panels are only really useful while the car is parked. This is the case for all "solar powered" electric cars.
The downside of aluminum air batteries is that they are not rechargeable, so the idea would be to design the cars so that the batteries can quickly be swapped. The discharged battery can be recycled.
It was an interesting idea.
I think the better long-term solution is electrified roads. (There are some pilot projects in Sweden that use rails embedded in slots in the road surface. The underside of a car or truck has a device that makes electrical contact.) With the right infrastructure it should be possible to drive non-stop from, say, Seattle to New York with a battery pack that's only good for a hundred miles or so.
I think giant batteries on EVs the same way I think about pontoons on commercial airliners: if, like Pan Am, you need to rely on existing port and harbor infrastructure because the airports you want to use haven't been built yet, sea planes make a lot of sense. But now that we have modern airports they don't.
> 5kW (that's 5kWh per hour)
It's 5kW for an hour - but I think you understand that, and implicitly mean something like 'per hour continuously/on average over time' (where the 'over time' makes us dimensionally ok again).
A good question to ask people is: How much work do you think can be done using the energy in a barrel of oil? As in, how much equivalent labour can you get out of it? Think of lifting heavy objects, pumping water, that kind of thing where it can be done by either a person or a machine fueled by oil.
Most people will say something like "a few days of work" or somesuch. The reality is closer to a fit adult male doing backbreaking labour all day every day like a slave for a full year.
Using up a barrel of oil is the same as having a slave toiling away for you for a year! One barrel = one energy slave for a year.
Put in those terms, a few things start to make sense:
At about $100-$150 per barrel, energy slaves are fantastically cheap, undercutting even the most impoverished human labourers in the most economically disadvantaged countries. Even some of the poorest people on Earth make about $300 annually. This means that having and using oil is an incredible boost to an economy, as each barrel burnt is effectively a very-nearly-free labourer adding to the output of the workforce. This is why many countries are so obsessed about controlling their supply of oil. The United States, of course, but also many western countries.
People in the US use an average of about 20 barrels of oil annually, which is the equivalent of having 20 slaves, each! That's not even counting coal, nuclear, and natural gas. Effectively, each person in the United States is about as wealthy as a very rich person in Ancient Rome. Think senator, or similar. But this makes sense: a typical person in the US can travel internationally on a whim, and enjoy fantastic luxuries that Romans couldn't even dream of.
Take the oil away, and the wealth goes away. Of course, other energy slaves can be substituted, but the point is the same -- our wealth is largely due to this "uncomplaining" workforce that is cheaper than the cheapest human labour.
>including embodied energy
Which is
>Embodied energy is the sum of all the energy required to produce any goods or services, considered as if that energy was incorporated or 'embodied' in the product itself.
I'm far below the 2k limit on mains energy usage, but I suspect after factoring in above it'll be comically far off. Making all this plastic stuff can't be energy cheap...
Or you can “cheat” by insisting used items don’t carry the energy cost because those were already borne by the original owner.
When calculating footprint I generally use the partial cost paid for the item as proxy for the partial footprint to attribute for its total lifecycle. Interested in hearing about degenerate/edge cases.
It might slightly underprice used electronics, but if the alternative destination is a landfill, that slight underpricing seems fine to me.
Part of the issue with it is that what is "most energy efficient/best for the planet" for a single user may not scale up to what is best for everyone to do.
There's also a problem in that future years of function cannot be estimated well or reliably; the average American kitchen will last 40-60 years, but be remodeled in 10-15 years. Since you cannot control what happens after your house is sold, you are better off using another calculation (or assuming that the purchaser of your house will bulldoze it or something).
E.g: human rest power is ca 100W at ca 20% efficiency. The agricultural production is at best 2% efficient. That's already 25kW, just to survive. * Edit: partially wrong, see comments below. *
But it is perhaps relevant to exclude all non-CO2 energy sources? Thus putting the agricultural efficiency much higher since the sunlight would be "0".
It's still about 50-150kW average of sunlight for the absolute minimum to sustain a person with a mostly closed ecosystem (this will also feed numerous insects/bacteria/fungi/etc). A very optimized hydro setup might do it with 2~kW based on C4 photosynthesis being about 4%.
But yes, excluding sunlight of a reasonable amount of agricultural and urban land seems sensible.
Thanks for catching that. Sedentary lifestyle is around 2000kcal/day, ca 100W.
I assumed the ca 20% efficiency was for efficiency of chemical energy extraction from the food (on average, varies a lot between carbohydrate, protein, fats) to storage as glucose/fat before we run it to ... > AMP > ... > ATP & NADH.
But that should probably already be taken into account by the output calculations from the agricultural production. Right? (so my original comment was wrong).
Embarrassing that I don't know this off the top of my head. I used to be good at it. Need to dust off the books. Or probably buy new ones since the field has progressed since last I dug around in it.
There are small scale farming methods that feed one person on about 400m^2 with some experience and almost no inputs other than water, or up to 6 people on a quarter acre/1000m^2 block with minimal inputs.
160m^2 in a very good climate is very roughly 50kW average including day/night and some weather.
So a hundred or so kW seems like a pretty reasonable total budget to aim for, with 10% used by things that aren't plants (which would come to ~2kW of work at current efficiencies).
Re. the idea that I'd believe 2kW was possible (if beyond current methods):
These methods generally dedicate around 30% of the land to energy limited crops like potato, and of that land maybe half is covered by a leaf.
You can beat sunlight->photosysnthesis in efficiency by only producing photons that plants use well (currently the best is blue+phosphor white LEDs), and I'm willing to believe without evidence that precisely scheduling and dosing your light could double output again. As could switching to some king of genetically modified corn or sorghum from potatoes. Recycling nutrients on a budget of a few hundred watts plus whatever is in discarded leaf matter seems somewhat scifi but not impossible.
Furthermore, don't forget your investments! Those are earning money BECAUSE they are consuming power. The workers build more houses, drive more cars, and consume more power to go on vacation to Tahiti. Profit is reinvested to consume more power. You own/rent it, you're responsible.
This connects to the formula for estimating "net worth of a country": one has to add up net worths of just people and non-profits (and govt infrastructure), because everything else is 100% owned.
If you want to embed the capital costs (and not just the marginal costs of production) into products you have a much bigger amortization problem. Do you do it on the first sale so the first Tesla generates a billion metric tons of carbon, the first 10 years, the first million, retroactively?
What about companies that never sell a product, but consume billions of $$ in R&D? Do the employees own that, or the owners, or society as a whole?
If you can figure all of that out for the owner, you can certainly recalculate the carbon footprint of a tesla in real time.
In my opinion, carbon footprint follows the inventory. It is on your books until someone buys the good or service.
Even donations to charity have carbon footprint. Imagine you give to a charity that pays gas bills for poor people. Those people didn't buy that oil/gas. The one giving to charity did.
You earn money, you spend money, you save money, you give away money... that money gets spent on objects with embedded carbon. Unless you want to say that corporations get a free pass, or the government gets a free pass, or banks get a free pass, or wealthy people get a free pass. Just like taxes... maybe the monarchy gets a free pass?
Now there's still a way to game it, which is to have your company pay for everything. Just like cheating on your taxes, if you have no income and everything is held in a corp, then whoever holds the corp owns your carbon production.
By that logic, as long as I don't own a company I have no carbon footprint if I drive a Hummer everyday, have my meals flown in from France, and lease a power hungry mansion.
After all, the Hummers carbon footprint belongs to the auto manufacturer and oil company, the footprint of the flights belong to the airline company, and the owner of the mansion is responsible for my extravagance. I'm not responsible for my carbon because the companies are the ones that sold me all these things I enjoy
Disposable stuff in general is a big issue, but lots of natural fiber clothes get landfilled too without much thought.
https://www.eupedia.com/ecology/carbon_footprint_consumer_pr...
Climate change will cause many tens of trillions of dollars in damages and/or mitigations.
Halting climate change would cost < $10T.
A world that was spending $10T to stop climate change would be incentivizing carbon capture, among many other things. It would also disincentivize oil production. If you were paid substantial money to store atmospheric carbon and oil was really expensive, then turning atmospheric carbon into stable plastic could be highly profitable.
Plastic is relatively cheap, energy-wise. Your embodied energy usage is dominated by semiconductors.
Edit: Google tells me that a laptop takes 4500MJ to manufacture. If you were living in a 2kW society, you'd have to save up 1250kWh, or about a month, to get your laptop.
Obviously personal car ownership is right of the question.
Given how energy costly cement is, and how much quantity we use, I'd be really surprised if it didn't dwarf semiconductors by several orders of magnitude.
If it’s reinforced steel the energy usage leaps up.
Building is incredibly energy intensive and very wasteful.
Thanks for your link, it’s really interesting.
https://www.archpaper.com/2019/01/concrete-production-eight-...
There's a vision we can all get excited about.
(though I would assume public infrastructure to use less energy now, with the efficiency improvements in lighting)
Induced demand, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand.
But people buy cheap plastic garbage they throw out that probably just would not exist if plastic didn’t.
I’d guess overall it’s a win for the environment, though it’s very unevenly distributed in any case. It’s obviously much worse for pollution in the ocean, for instance.
Also fun fact: it was originally developed to replace ivory in billiard balls and without that we probably wouldn’t have elephants left.
It won’t be so cheap when we have to synthesize the feedstock.
Very rough breakdown here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy-usage/
Also, this sadly puts even my household's meager (by US standards) car mileage (6k miles/yr) as the bulk of our energy usage. Cars are such a waste of life, energy, and space...
Yeah - one of the things i learned building this is the huge amount of energy it takes to move humans anywhere (in cars/planes). News articles often mention trivial things like turning off phone chargers, when the energy consumption from car use dominates total energy use from electricity for most households.
Electric cars are genuinely a lot better in this regard, and the payoff period for the embedded cost of manufacture is lower than many people think: https://www.robinlinacre.com/carbon_electric_car/
Not sure how to quantify taking a bus to work.
On the worst day in winter my consumption is usually ~1kWh, limited by solar production.
The US has many many houses with 4000+ square feet, and no good way to heat it cool outside if AC and a furnace. Are we going to bulldoze all existing houses to meet this goal? What’s the impact of that to the environment?
Big is generally easier to keep warm than small thanks to the square cube law, but even in pathological cases it's never harder when scaling up.
Even assuming that 4000 sq ft is spread over 4 levels, that's a ground area of just under 93 m^2, and even in Anchor Point Alaska [0] with 15% panels, that roof can make more on average than the other poster says they're using.
[0] This map doesn't go as far north as Anchorage: https://solargis.com/maps-and-gis-data/download/world
Nah, we can retrofit. There are more efficient means of heating/cooling, like mini-splits and heat pumps, insulation, geothermal, etc. With more local and energy-efficient methods (and better insulation) we can get much better efficiencies.
Back in the day, for heating you would have one or two fireplaces. The home was configured so that rooms would get progressively colder away from the heat source. You wouldn't heat the whole home, just one or two rooms, unless there was a special occasion, and then you'd open all the doors. For passive cooling, house facing was critical, as were ventilation, cross-breezes, and later on fans. Homes located in places with extreme temperature shifts were designed to open or close up more or less over the seasons, although they were never "efficient" as they often had no insulation.
I can't even imagine what a 4000sq ft home looks like. You would start using olde timey names for random rooms. "This is the Conservatory, where we keep our 4th xbox, just in case".
Often the newer ones have large amounts of "waste space" where hallways are larger, entryways are larger, rooms of course are larger.
That house seems to have been built in 1971.
In contrast, here is a brand new home in the same city that is only 1200 sqft.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/154-Lt-Rusty-Dr-Naples-TX...?
It seems like someone is building sensibly sized homes there, however rare.
Square feet is such a bad measurement of a house, but it's easy to measure and state so it continues unabated.
You also have weird economies of scale where the first 1k sq ft of a house is much more expensive than the second 1k, and that continues basically until you're forced to use other construction methods (steel, for example).
For reference, that's 370m². In European terms that's probably double what you would expect for a typical family of four.
https://www.frugalfringe.com/calculators/compare-your-homes-...
https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/highlights.html
> The median size of a new single-family home sold in 2021 was 2,356 square feet.
https://www.frugalfringe.com/calculators/compare-your-homes-...
The two of us use just under 5kWh / day average electricity. Our big energy use is heat in winter though! Here is the breakdown:
5kWh/day electric * 365 days = 1825 kWh/year electrons
2.5 cords wood (mostly oak) = 17584 kWh/year wood heat
300 gal. liquid propane = 8400 kWh/year propane heat
That's a total of ~27800 kWh/year for the two of us including heat. That's about 76 kWh/day or 38 kWh/day per person on average. *This includes charging my e-bike for my work commute--but we also have a gas car so not nearly all transportation energy costs.[edited to add this]
I can't see any way to go much lower than that without freezing in the winter. 2 kWh/day seems crazy low to me.
Some of it depends on the local climate and other factors that you don’t have a lot of control over though.
i understand that probably doesn't fit OP's lifestyle, and i'm not suggesting they move to an apartment. but i think it's important to acknowledge that dense urban living can have significant environmental benefits over the sort of self-sufficient, off-grid, rural lifestyle that's typically regarded as being more environmentally friendly. cities, and specifically apartments, are very efficient.
Although high density can be more energy efficient, it’s not the only metric to consider. Apartment dwellers are completely dependent on importing resources, while rural people at least have a chance at breaking the dependency.
At best, you've proved that a planet composed entirely of cities is unsustainable. I hope nobody wants that, but sadly some people do.
If you’re talking about high density in a concrete city, then cooling is a problem.
For comparison, we're currently working on our home (bought last year around this time). The new insulation will be U=0.1455 for walls & roof (R-68?) and U=0.29 to the basement. I don't recall the values for windows & the front door. We'll also replace oil with a heat pump and add a ventilation system with heat exchanger. And we only have 1500sqft for two (no additions planned). That will probably be still miles away from those 2kWh/d/person, but much better than the status quo (~2.5kW of heat alone, per person).
Obviously you're already in a good ball park, but GPs value of 2kWh/d/person is just really amazing.
It's 2kW/person, or 2kWh/h/person, or 48kWh/d/person
But as GP[0] replied to GGP
> 2 kWh/day seems crazy low
I was under the impression that he was actually pondering a much better personal energy consumption of 83W/person. And yeah, I'm inclined to say that (with our current level of technology) achieving this number without lowering standard of living might be nearly impossible in many climate zones.
The rest of my comment is more generic.
Apart from insulation energy required for heating changes massively with local climate and scales directly with living space. So directly comparing those numbers without additional information is quite meaningless.
Here in Germany, which seems to have a roughly similar climate, ~120kwh/m2 and year is the average for a detached home. Modern buildings are usually a lot less though, 30-50 kWh/m2year seems standard. With specialised construction ('passive house') and heatpumps 10 kWh/m2year is well feasible.
Since your house is very large for just two people, you could occupy only a fraction of it, and heat only that part. Or, just move to a smaller house.
I'm not entirely sure if the article intends to measure embodied energy, though, which your calculations don't capture.
Have you done any analysis or testing on low-e vs normal glass windows in the wintertime? In summer, obviously you want the low-e glass to block the radiant energy. But in the winter, you'd want to allow that radiant energy through, which the low-e glass is not doing.
It seems like low-e glass is only good for summer, and not winter. Have you put any thought into this? Maybe I am missing something crucial about the situation though.
Low-E glass reduces inside heat radiating to the outside, too. You can find many articles online discussing the advantages during winter/heating season if you look.
I tested a couple years with/without a tinting film on my west-facing windows (under mini-blinds) and noticed a very, very small increase in winter heating costs, with a big decrease in summer cooling costs, and more consistent temperatures throughout the day in both seasons, which is a benefit in itself (you can use a lower-capacity HVAC system). I suspect a proper upgrade to low-E windows (or at least tinting ALL my windows) would have done much better.
It's probably dominated by your vehicle if you have one (decent rule of thumb is abkut equal to the fuel you'd put through an ICE of the same size in a given time)
Personal vehicle means space to park it. Space to park it means things are further spread out. This leads to a few inevitabilities:
Things being further spread out means walking and public transit are less feasible.
Individual vehicles means insufficient political support for infrastructure for walking, cycling, and public transit.
The mass required for living (water, food, energy, trash, sewage) has to travel further, and energy = force * distance.
Of course, people’s desire to have backyards and space in general contributes to even more spreading out, but individual cars go hand in hand since they enable being able to consume more space.
In other words, there is no getting around the fact that energy and distance scale with each other, so anything that allows one to consume more space, and hence cause mass to travel more distance, has a multiplier effect on energy consumption.
Although there is somewhat of a counter point to your energy and distance scaling. Without infrastructure and laws forcing the worst possible vehicles, it's quite possible to build a comfortable vehicle which will hang on your wall in a bedroom that does 40-80km/h for several hours a day with the only energy input being the sunlight that falls on it and human effort equivent to a brisk walk.
Similarly a self sufficient homestead doesn't need those utilities and can sustain a person in surpriaingly little area.
We don't have to force the minority who want an actually rural lifestyle to give it up. We just have to apply the same rules and changes that would fix suburbia.
A low-input, no-beef, mostly vegetarian homestead with a 2 story cottage that manages its own utilities and has a 2m wide LEV path 10km to the train station is no more unsustainable than arranging those ingredients into some large farms and a large city. It could be a large mostly-native food forest, or an acre of high yield closed system.
It would be vastly less labour efficient, but if a household wants to dedicate one member's time to agriculture and domestic labour that's fine.
That said, I have an off-grid office (w/ ~5kw of storage and 1.5kw of solar) and it has definitely changed the way I use energy at home, and what my expectations for my next home will be.
Generally negawatts (watts you don't use due to efficiency or insulation) have always been the cheapest watts, that's only recently become less true because of solar price declines.
I'm in the lets use as much green energy as we want camp. The hair-shirt stuff from many in the green movement is the main reason I don't take them seriously.
Agreed that GW and sea level rise are existential issues for coastal communities (and possibly the human race as a whole) but why cap energy usage from Nuclear, Wind and Solar.
I'd sign up for a 100W cap on carbon faster than a 10kW cap on energy.
- Nuclear doesn't take up that much space.
- BitCoin/crypto mining is so wasteful someone will think up a better idea. I'm sure if it.
This is already happening with desalination and hydrogen production via electrolysis, and hydrocarbon production (for carbon-neutral transport fuel) is being piloted too. Future likely applications include electrolytic refining of iron ore to the metal. Cheap electricity is going to enable new industries we haven't thought of yet.
"P2X" is the abbreviation to look out for.
But I agree it's very misguided if it gets turned into strict quota system that everyone is locked into. We don't want to turn civilization a zero sum game.
Sure, you can slowly switch out old production for new cleaner sources of energy. The fastest way to reduce carbon footprints (and cheapest) is to reduce demand.
Growing consumer awareness over their over-consumption, to change their behaviour, is one of the most powerful and direct solutions we have.
Actually, that has been shown time and time again to be false. Asking consumers to change their behavior to lower energy consumption is about as effective as telling people to diet and exercise to lose weight: it may work on an individual level, but it is a complete failure at a societal level, and when it comes to decarbonizing the economy, the societal level is all that matters.
If we want to lower people's energy consumption, we need to make policy and economic changes, e.g. raising the cost of certain types of energy use so that it causes people to reconsider their use of it, or redesigning spaces so that less energy use is needed (e.g. making public transportation, or human-powered transportation, a more viable alternative to driving).
Reducing consumption is a huge part of the solution, especially because it makes the extremely hard energy storage problem way more tractable.
Being in the gulf coast region automatically makes it nearly impossible to fit a 2kW budget during the summer (unless you live in a large walk-in freezer), but during the winter I was able to get down to 800 watts continuous for a period of a few days. This included my computer, fridge, some lights and central furnace blower. The furnace is kind of cheating though - replacing the natural gas with a heat pump would instantly blow my 2kW budget all on its own. That said, you could probably get really close if you tried to hit the target with a modern heat pump and good insulation throughout.
The only reason I voluntarily subjected myself to this was because I was being billed $9/kWH thru Griddy (a wholesale, real-time rate provider) during the entire, multi-day incident. I did run a one-off load of laundry that probably cost me ~$50.
Requiring use of variable rate energy providers and forcing consumers to adapt habits to the available resources seems like one way to get people to pay attention to how much energy various things consume. It also seems like an effective way to mitigate one-off generation shortfalls.
I sometimes think it would be a lot easier to just move most people away from here... at least those living in big badly insulated electrically heated houses. Some pensioners actually do move to Spain, maybe visit the summer cottages every now and then (when it's too hot in Spain and the cottage doesn't need heating). Birds certainly follow the seasons.
I guess the same applies to very hot climates. You could move away for the summer at least, if not completely.
[0] https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Carbonoffset/P... [1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
Metric R5 insulation is quite achievable, and you don't need to keep things at a perfect 24C year round in the whole building.
I live in an area that has plenty of 35-40C days and have never used more than 1kW on average even in a poorly insulated rental. On the really bad days you just cool one room.
Also the 2kW is entire primary energy (ie. including fuel and the energy to drill for and refine the fuel and make the AC etc. etc.). In a western country it's almost impossible to get your share of the total energy budget that low because you likely are not allowed to go many places without being in a car (or travelling 5x as far and waiting 10 minutes to cross each road) and the shops will all be blasting AC with the doors open.
So ~5kWh for a load of washing? Use a cold wash and a clothes line instead of the tumble dryer and you'd be well under a single kWh.
You could use 2000Wh of electricity in Texas, but that would still only be 29% zero carbon.
You could use 5000Wh of electricity in Norway, but 99% of that would be zero carbon. This is superior to the 2000Wh approach.
This group seems to get it as they're talking about reducing Primary Energy without reducing standard of living (mostly done by "electrifying everything") but I don't think that would be clear to most readers, who will just ignore the "same standard of living bit" and feel they are being oppressed.
I think this is an uncharitable view, but that aside, is that not a reasonable assumption for "most readers"? This group is exceptional in that they explicitly state maintaining the same standard of living as a goal. In what I know of most modern climate-related discourse, there are very few such mentions.
Which specific groups are you aware of that think dealing with climate change by phasing out burning fossil fuels will reduce standards of living? I think you'll find a common funding source behind them.
For example, House Resolution 109 of the 116th Congress[0] mentions "[ensuring] prosperity and economic security" as an objective, but being sandwiched between "[achieving] net-zero greenhouse gas emissions" and "[promoting] justice and equity" it's difficult to see it as more than hand-waving and one that won't be forfeited for those other goals once the rubber meets the pavement.
Bernie Sanders' website on the issue[1] doesn't mention the standard of living at all among the Key Points. AOC's[2] does but in the same way as HR 109, which makes sense given that she was the sponsor behind it. The New York Times explainer[3] on the issue does not even discuss whether the average person's material standard of living will change.
The number one goal from all sources is the categorical imperative of going "net-zero" or "100% renewable", without asking or answering the question of "at what cost at the margins" (again, other than the undefined cost of calamity), which is what I'm really interested in addressing; because it's going to be a very hard sell to tell the people of the developed world to scale back on their standard of living, and a great moral injustice to tell the people of the yet-to-be-developed world that they cannot take advantage of cheap, abundant energy sources.
[0]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolutio... [1]: https://berniesanders.com/issues/green-new-deal/ [2]: https://www.ocasiocortez.com/green-new-deal [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/climate/green-new-deal-qu...
global warming at or above 2 degrees Celsius beyond preindustrialized levels will cause -
* (B) more than $500,000,000,000 in lost annual economic output in the United States by the year 2100;
... other bad stuff..
* (F) a risk of damage to $1,000,000,000,000 of public infrastructure and coastal real estate in the United States
Which is just a summary of the IPCC which goes into great detail on the GDP impacts.
And that's just the "Green" part, they immediately launch into a bunch of things that just are standard of living and how they want to improve it.
> life expectancy declining while basic needs, such as clean air, clean water, healthy food, and adequate health care, housing, transportation, and education, are inaccessible to a significant portion of the United States population;
So I think we've conclusively demonstrated, that you're not reading/hearing what these peaple are actually saying.
edit: on Bernie's relatively short page which you provided the link to:
> The cost of inaction is unacceptable. Economists estimate that if we do not take action, we will lose $34.5 trillion in economic activity by the end of the century. And the benefits are enormous: by taking bold and decisive action, we will save $2.9 trillion over 10 years, $21 trillion over 30 years, and $70.4 trillion over 80 years.
And this is from a plan that pays for itself in 15 years.
But I posit that you are able to enjoy a car-less life due to the existence of fossil fuel-burning elsewhere: the public transportation you presumably ride, the groceries that are delivered to the store presumably within walking distance from where you live, the construction of your residence and all commercial buildings near you, the massive industrial production at scale that allows you to trade a smaller amount of your time for more goods and services. All of those things are, as you point out, built on the back of cheap energy. It would be downright immoral to deny that same opportunity to the people of the developing world.
And objectively speaking, having the capacity to do something is better than not having it. Whether you eat meat or not, it is objectively better for the common folk to be able to afford it; whether you own a car or not, it is objectively better to have the ability to move people and goods across long distances at an affordable price; whether you artificially cool and heat your home or not, it is objectively better for people to be able to live in comfort in places they otherwise may not be able to. Privation may end up being better for your health, both mental and physical, but only if it arises out of choice.
I’m not so sure I would universalize this. Up to a point sure, but there’s certainly a point at which having the capacity to do something quickly or easily can be detrimental. Some examples:
- We have a ton of unhealthy, nutrient-poor, high-calorie foods practically at arm’s reach in the US. Not all of us have the self-control to avoid grabbing them in the supermarket. Myself included! I certainly wish I didn’t have quite so many unhealthy options nearby; I’d probably be healthier if I didn’t.
- Being able to easily move people long distances (in particular via cars, which are horrifically space-inefficient) has led to people moving far away from population centers and infrastructure that requires cars for transportation. The presence of convenient cars as an option in a sense removes choices, because the infrastructure required to sustain them makes other forms of transportation impractical. I would gladly trade the capacity to move quickly through my city in a car for the ability to safely bike around it.
Well yes, but much, much less of it than if everyone drives everywhere.
> And objectively speaking, having the capacity to do something is better than not having it.
All else being equal, then sure. But all else is not equal. There's a significant cost to producing all of that energy. And it is not likely to be feasible to sustain the entire world at US (or even European) levels of energy usage anytime soon. As such, it's quite reasonable to start having a conversation about what high-energy usage activities we might be able to cut out without having too significant an impact on quality of life. Things like reducing meat consumption (not necessarily cutting it out entirely), reducing car usage, and cutting down on air travel, etc are obvious candidates for this.
Either the developed world gives up on its luxuries or they will be forcefully taken by a complex climate system that is not beholden to political statements.
I guess we're going to have to wait until several major cities are utterly destroyed, or a few mass-heat-death events occur, before some people finally get it.
We don't have time, we don't have the resources, and we don't have the global societal cohesion to address this problem in the way a lot of the fantasists in this thread would prefer.
If you don't focus on efficiency they might just invent new ways to use energy that don't really improve standard of living.
It's a lot easier to switch to renewables if you don't need as much energy in the first place.
Power consumption can also generate a lot of heat. I'm not sure how much of a factor it plays in the big picture.
I did find this: "Results show that the urban heat island causes an average increase of 2.2 °C in the external air temperature mainly caused by the waste heat rejected from cooling system" (https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/9/3/48/htm)
And while it's true UHIs don't significantly contribute towards climate change, they can cause increased rainfall, and presumably have some effect on agricultural production that's done near larger cities.
(Facts quickly googled)
Area of Los Angeles: 1.29 * 10⁹ m²
Height of air column over city: say 1000m
Volume of air = 1.29 * 10¹² m³
Mass of air (density 1.29 g/l) = 1.66 * 10¹² kg
Energy of air (700 J/kg for each C) = 2.32 * 10¹⁵ J
Equivalent number of barrels of oil (6.1 * 10⁹ J) = 380327 ~= 0.4 * 10⁶
Daily consumption in all of california: 1.8*10⁶ barrels
If the calculations are right, you would have to burn around 20% of California's daily consumption inside the city to raise the air temperature by 2C.
I suppose it's less of an issue if your power plant uses sea water as coolant.
The only problem is storage. Carrying a wallet with a few MJ in it may be just hazardous, even if transferring funds is 100% efficient (using superconductivity). So any realistic scheme would include some tokens, with associated energy stored / generated elsewhere.
More realistically, these tokens are associated with the economic and military might of the issuing party; this is similar to what modern fiat money is.
Because the miner reward for securing the monetary network is intrinsically linked to electricity availability, there will always be fundamental link between cost of electricity and value of bitcoin.
This is of course all a way of getting everyone on board with our real, material situation, which is that there is a finite amount of carbon that we can afford to dump into the atmosphere in the immediate next few centuries.
This is basically just cap-and-trade with extra steps but has the advantage of novelty, and that it is graspable by the average voter who (rightfully) views cap-and-trade schemes as being 1) really boring and 2) mainly a way for Wall Street types to scam money out of productive enterprises. Under this scheme, we can generate huge public support for green energy schemes since each new watt of generation installed this month will mean everyone is better off in real terms next month.
We could produce far more energy than we could ever save by cutting. It is not an accident that the historical chart of quality of life vs. energy consumption per capita is up and to the right.
Let's have a 20,000-Watt society, not a 2,000-Watt one.
But, let's make sure that the production, storage and distribution of energy, in all its forms, is sustainable, and available to every country.
The trend is already here: cheaper than ever solar and wind energy, cheaper and cheaper energy storage, new energy breakthroughs, promising ones like nuclear, etc.
It means the world will be able to soon produce much more energy, using only sustainable sources.
Let's make energy available to everyone, at an affordable rate. That's my dream. Not a communist-like starvation of sorts.
You know this really means “let’s keep the average per capita consumption high, so I can keep spending the 10x more than a third world citizen” right?
> Not a communist-like starvation of sorts.
Rational usage of resources is very far from “starvation”.
Article from MIT regarding Solar energy: "The potential is enormous, says MIT physics professor Washington Taylor, who co-teaches a course on the physics of energy. A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use. And that energy is completely renewable — at least, for the lifetime of the sun. "It's finite, but we're talking billions of years," Taylor says. "
There is no successful path to stopping global warming that dramatically drives up energy cost or reduces quality of life. Plentiful zero carbon energy is the path forward.
20kW is obscene needless waste, wholesale destruction of anything near a city or industrial area, exhaustion of every scarce resource and with the albedo increase and waste heat it entails will give us climate change just through sheer thermal output.
A PA system for a rock concert might be 20 kW.
A rock concert serves hundreds or thousands of people for a few tens of hours in a year. It adds milliwatts.
20kW each is 160TW. 20kW of work per person if prodiced in the area is enough to double the heat that a city like paris has to dissipate.
At 160TW from fission, world uranium reserves last a single year in a LWR or a few decades at full burnup (which basically no nuclear programs do). Thorium reserves would barely last longer.
At 160TW from PV we need 100 million tonnes of panels to be produced per year just for maintenance and to cover an absurd amount of land. Current tech would use all of the silver ten times over. Copper in the panels and wiring would use 5-100% of world reserves.
At 160TW direct thermal forcing is 1W/m^2 which isn't as catastrophic as 500ppm CO2, but is about the current GHG forcing (which is just going super swell). Take into account any realistic generation scenario (3W/W of heating from nuclear or 2W/W of albedo increase) and you're in a 2 or 3 degree heating scenario on top of our GHG problems. Add in a few billion more people and any 20kW future is apocalyptic.
20kW is obscene and if you think a lifestyle based on that level of wanton waste can be sustained without forcing many others in other places and other times to suffer you are deluded.
But more than that, we won't have the choice. Thermodynamics will constrain us sooner or later.
US has much larger homes and drives far more inefficiently due to individual vehicle usage instead of mass transit.
Reducing those by 6x would be a huge change.
I do cheat by using a propane range for cooking and wood for heat. At some point I'd like to move to an electric induction stove, but I need to do some research how efficient they are.
I know for a fact that the induction cooktop is the epitome of efficiency. Virtually every watt that passes through the switching electronics and coils winds up somewhere in the cookware.
I've got a Breville control freak and a 750w microwave oven as my emergency cooking gear for when I am stuck on solar battery backup.
* Electricity - 13,000 kWh * Natural Gas - 7,000 kWh * Gasoline - 14,000 kWh
Burning stuff is just so wildly inefficient. A heat pump to replace my furnace and water heater; and only using the electric car would cut my direct energy usage in half.
That's more due to the seemingly magical properties of heat pumps producing 2-3x as much heat as energy input.
Burning nat gas to create heat in your home is nearly 100% efficient, which is why resistant electric heaters generally can't compete. Though resistant heaters might be more carbon neutral depending on your local grid.
Of course, burning stuff to do mechanical work is quite inefficient, especially in a small scale engine like a car. If we must burn stuff, we should do it is massive thermal plants that have the money and expertise to squeeze out the maximum efficiency possible, and deliver electricity to do the small scale work, like driving.
We did buy energy efficient everything: Induction range, hybrid heat pump water heater, spent extra on insulation, heat pump furnace, LED lights, medium-wattage desktop computer, high MPGe EV, etc.
However, we live in a normal US house with few compromises (though we don't need air conditioning or heating most days, due to the local climate).
It makes me wonder how the average US household is at 12KW. That's roughly two of our house's air conditioners running full blast, per person, 24 hours a day.
If you've eliminated transportation and heating that is #1 and #2 for most people's energy consumption. Third place would likely be air-conditioning, and you've eliminated that too.
Even if we kept the thermostat at 120F in the winter and 32F in the summer, we’d still be under 3kw per person (due to our furnace being on 100% of the time and never reaching temperature).
But yes. It is relatively trivial to come closer to a sustainable level than the US average.
They're including transportation costs.
48kWh is a much smaller amount when it includes all of our per capita economic activity.
Why the distinction? Why not all citizens?
Though air source are getting so good that places that require ground source are getting smaller.
In order to reach the goal in the article, a three-person household would need to restrict energy use to 52560 KWh/year, /including/ all those things AND the production of everything that household consumes.
I can't see how it's even remotely possible with today's technology and societal climate. That being said, there's no harm in researching and developing more efficient technologies. I don't even want to think about how bad the energy crisis would be if we were all still using 60w/40w lightbulbs.
If you drove 20 miles, that’s 10% of your energy budget for the day, even if you did it all in a single hour.
- the "Green" new deal, originally have imagined (with a classic managerial fallacy) a world made up by single-family homes in places with enough Sun for p.v., BEVs, a little need to move and no industries. Perhaps because this is the way some manager's live and they call it sobriety respect of others who do differently. Than they discover people's in crowd then to behave in stupid ways, like Le Bon describe in his masterpiece BUT not that stupid so grid-connected p.v. without stationary and/or on-wheel storage because cutting electricity bill with p.v. for a significant amount of locations on earth pay back, the rest do not. As a result electricity grids are more and more unstable. Keeping the frequency is always hard and we have chosen to made "large enough" grids to have a "slowly changing mean load" slow enough that big power plants can keep up the frequency; when p.v/eolic start to be big enough the power peaks they produce make's the grid frequency skyrocket or fall too fast for large power plants to lower/step up their generator power. Not counting the fact that most people do not live in single-family homes where a p.v. system and an on-wheel battery can live with;
- some politicians who have blindly follow the initial vague dream have decided the answer is "reduce energy consumption" and have even invented ways to reduce it who actually increase the amount of consumed energy like regulating "how many hour to run the heating" vs "let the system run quietly 24/7;
- since most people DO NOT live on nor have p.v. anyway most home appliance are NOT designed to maximize self consumption witch means run full power as quick as possible when energy from the Sun is available vs try to spread the load as much as possible to keep the grid load as stable as possible. As a result most p.v. systems instead of target maximizing self-consumption target to produce as many kWh as possible. As a result p.v. systems are LESS interesting and the grid is more strained.
A simple example: most hot-water systems try to run few minutes every hours instead of all at once on input. To keep a grid load stable running few minutes every hours and have small quantity of water to heat is IDEAL, you consume less energy and keep the load stable on average. On p.v. it's the exact opposite. Since the Sun shine for limited period of time but when it do it offer much energy what it count is heating as much as possible large amount of water to have enough hot water for the rest of the day, possible for more than one day. Essentially NO system on sale offer such simple regulation, while some offer "grid-backed" regulations like grid energy meters who told "run" or "do not run" depending on current grid load but in ways that are hard to be used on p.v. even if they are very similar. Another example: most appliance start to consume from 0 to max in a snap. For the grid is not an issue, the single appliance consume a very small fraction of power of a power plant and on average that's just noise. Small p.v. inverters on contrary have issues keeping up such peaks, who happen to be big at micro-grid scale. As a result many appliance like ovens who try to use peaks to reduce the total amount of kWh consumed they run very bad on p.v. in self-consumption and inverter stress terms. Again: some appliance try to run for longer time to reduce the amount of peak power usage, while on p.v. it's better run quickly to run an appliance after the other in the limited amount of time the Sun shine and so on.
Long story short if some really want a new deal:
- ALL BEVs MUST have an open standard data port (no matter if canbus or something else) to talk to any p.v. inverter on sale allowing to do the same stationary battery inverters and batteries do: charge ONLY from p.v., offering power from battery to the home to a maximum DOD if the grid do work, another threshold if case of grid blackout and parameters to tell the car ensuring a minimum SOC for a certain point in time allowing to charge from the grid if needed;
- BEV need to cost equally of their correspondent ICE not pushing up ICE and fuel price to makes EV convenient;
- incentive de-urbanization in the sense from a multi-apartments building (sorry I do not know how to name such buildings in English) to a single family home if you live there for a certain amount of years;
- impose a simple and cheap communication mode to power-hungry home appliances like simple modbus to allow their control from a central home system, like a home server/a p.v. inverter etc and allowing communication to tell how much power they going to need to run, in the next few seconds etc to allow inverters compensate peaks less hardly;
- incentives the design of systems targeting maximizing self-consumption instead of grid-tied "metering" like "I give X kWh, get back Y and so...".
Asking for "sobriety" is like asking do not panic on a sinking ship, the rebound effect is higher then else.
No guarantees that we are on that path, if it was the case we'd already all be running on nuclear but we made the opposite choice, in Europe for example because gas is cheaper, cheaper = more profit = growth = better and we all see where it got us
But let's continue with out ultra wasteful ways of life, surely when China and India catch up with EU/US level of waste the world will be saved
The second law exists and climate change is just the first of many symptoms of running face first into it.
2kW is a sensible limit for living on a planet and having it still be a planet worth living on. You might push it up an order of magnitude or two without cooking humans by fully transforming most habitable land and carefully rejecting 30% of the sunlight whilst using the rest, but that would destroy most ecosystems.
If you want a barren rock to bake, go live on the moon.
Climate change isn't "Grug burn too many fire, fire make hot.", it's a comparatively tiny shift in a delicate balance.
Primary energy is about 17TW this is roughly on the order of what can be utilized without drastically altering the planet.
GHG emissions shift the balance by about 200TW which is enough to be extremely harmful.
20kW is 170TW which is enough to be similarly harmful (although not to escalate to being apocalyptic).
2000MW per person is enough to raise the temperature of the entire earth (the whole thing, not the surface) by 25 degrees a year.
That's just over 1400 kWh per month. As a reference of personal and immediate consumption, most central- and north European apartment dwellers consume around 2000 kWh per year.
Anecdote: my household - two adults, two terrible cats, dishwasher, washing machine and tumble dryer, no TV, two bicycles and feet instead of a car - have consumed 160-170 kWh per month steadily, around the year, for as long as I can recall.
> The concept addresses not only personal or household energy use, but the total for the whole society, including embodied energy, divided by the population.
Filling up my car’s gas tank once is roughly 444 kWh in fuel value alone. Add to that gas refining, logistics and whatnot.
If the average person has a modern desktop there's a good chance it has 400w power supply. Run a 400w power supply for 8 hours and you have used 3.2 kwh [1]. That's already 1.2kwh over, without accounting for anything else.
I see the solution as providing renewable electricity at low cost, rather than reducing the amount of electricity.
If you use a 400 watt computer all of the time your personal remaining energy budget is 1600 watts. I use a computer around 10 hours a day during the week, and three or four on weekend days (so around a third of the time). Amortized, that means I would be using on average around 133 watts on computing, if I used such a desktop. But I actually use a Thinkpad T420, and its consumption averages out to around 30 watts when in use (so amortized to 10 watts).
On the plus side, i learned how to install and debug Cuda.
Second, the Macbook Pro which i use 8 hours a day has a 140W power supply but I'm sure it uses less than 50W on average.
- 50W * 8h = 0,4kWh
- 2kW * 24h = 48kWh.
The laptop isn't going to be the problem! Heating OTOH uses lots of energy so good insulation is the key.
Power is a flow, it's the rate of energy usage (or output) over time. More power means higher top speed, or stronger acceleration, or hill-climbing ability, or towing capacity.
Energy is a stock, it's a total quantity of potential. A bigger fuel tank won't make your car any faster, but it will determine how much range you have.
Since appliances, equipment, generators, etc., consume or produce watts of power, it's handy to consider how much energy this represents by simply multiplying watts by time, by default, hours.
Also a high end desktop computer might pull 400 W from the wall while gaming, but that's not something the average person does 8 hours a day. Light work on a desktop computer with a monitor should be around 80 W on average.
Well, first of all, the 400w is a limit, not a _target_. A computer with a 400w power supply does not generally run at 400w. If it did, you'd notice it; that's not an insignificant amount of heat.
However, more importantly, you've misread the article significantly:
> which pictures the average First World citizen reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day)
> Run a 400w power supply for 8 hours and you have used 3.2 kwh
So well within budget, then.
The average person doesn't have a desktop, let alone a 400w one, it's all phones and laptops these days
In the case of power supplies, both total capacity and durability are indicated by the power rating. I don't know what current thinking is, but recall when overspeccing the power supply was often recommended for reliability and cooling considerations.
I have an anecdote: many years ago when Bitcoin/altcoin mining on GPUs was still feasible I ran a rig with a 335 watt TDP graphics card, and the whole setup measured 360-something watts at the wall outlet. It ran 24/7 for months on a 400 watt PSU, without problems.
First 400W is peak not average.
Second Wh isn't W. 400W is 400/2000ths of 2000W
Third 500mW can provide a reasonable amount of compute for most tasks as evidenced by my 2 yo phone being a perfectly usable desktop when plugged into a monitor. The 10W to run peripherals vastly exceeds the compute needs and is mostly in the form of light being absorbed by an lcd. Before that I had a 6yo laptop that used around 3-10W including screen. Phone hardware is perfectly capable of gaming, local document editing, compiling, and even running small scientific workloads.
Fourth you're completely ignoring embodied energy, transport and climate control which are the things that actually matter.
Fifth. You can do things that aren't sit at a computer.
Sixth. A high power desktop isn't that common even amongst people who play new AAA games a lot.
Seventh. The attitude of 'we can't possibly deviate even miniscully from having everyone on earth follow my exact lifestyle (even the 90% of people who have no access to it) right down to one particularly wasteful aspect of it that has only been around for fifteen years in its current most wasteful form' is unfathomably small minded and entitled.
I predict a massive wave of immigration from Europe, Australia, and Canada to Latin America. There are already a ton of people from these countries showing up in Mexico because of Covid restrictions, easy immigration for first-worlders, and a lower cost of living. I suspect the upcoming winter of deprivation and economic crisis in Europe and other cold regions will send a bunch more economic/cold refugees that way.
Also, climate change.
Also there will be many, many climate refugees from floods, famines, droughts, super storms, fires, dust storms, and so on. Most of these issues are much harder to overcome than adding insulation, living in a reasonably sized home, sharing a wall or two, installing a heat pump, and putting on a jumper.
My latitude is about 60 (59.9139) degrees north and electric heating panels don’t seem to be the most efficient when it is below freezing.
With improved insulation and a modern heat pump, I’d be curious to see how much energy we would consume.
The vision here encompasses all energy use if I understand correctly.
Aside from that, accounting for the energy used to produce the food and consumables is somewhat challenging, so I don’t really consider it. But I suppose it would be worth trying to guesstimate? I’m not that familiar with the 2000-watt society.
The next few years are to be very rough, and nothing can be done to fix it. Deglobalization will make things even worse for countries that can't produce or purchase enough fuel, food or fertilizers.
Unluckily none of our governments seem to have had the forethought to either make the massive capital investment required for the former or the even bigger labour and knowledge investment to do the latter when this became obviously important.