Our Energy Future Series, Part 1: The Energy Mix and How We Got Here A drawing of Abel Pifre demonstrating his solar printing press. Energy is something we cannot do without. Ancient mankind needed fire for cooking and warmth just as much as current mankind needs oil and gas to heat our homes and electricity to turn on the lights and power the Internet. The modern world could not function without the technology we have invented since the industrial revolution and the connected lifestyles we have become accustomed to in what is now the digital revolution. We cannot, and would not want to, go back. But in energy terms, it’s proving increasingly challenging to manage. There are now over a billion websites used for everything from entertainment to shopping. Google alone processes more than 40,000 search queries per second, which amounts to 3.5bn Internet searches per day. Netflix streams an average of 125m hours of content per day too. And Amazon now manages over 3m orders per day, with China’s equivalent Alibaba doing four times that amount.
All of that requires electricity for processing. In fact, it takes more than 70bn kWh per year just to run the servers that process that Internet data on US soil, let alone those throughout the rest of the world. That’s enough energy to power 700bn 100W light bulbs for an hour every day of the year (or more than enough to light every home in the world using low energy LEDs). All that new technology usage adds to the traditional energy requirements from industry, housing and transport — which themselves are also increasing their energy demands. There are now more than 1.5bn households on the planet including 135m in the USA, the world’s third largest after China and India , many of […]