Kye Hong Kevin Park
Extra Credit #2
I choose two particular articles that relate to the value of chemistry to the benefit of the environment. One is a short article about a rechargeable battery driven by bacteria. The other article is about how US can be converted to 100 percent renewable energy country.
I chose these particular articles because of what I truly take away from the course. Through this course, I learned the value of chemistry to our environment. Chemistry has a tremendous importance and contribution to our environment. In the class, we have discussed the issue of pollution in the world we live today. The two articles articulate how we can save and benefit the environment ...view middle of the document...
In a new study, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, and colleagues, including U.C. Berkeley researcher Mark Delucchi, are the first to outline how each of the 50 states can achieve such a transition by 2050. The 50 individual state plans call for aggressive changes to both infrastructure and the ways we currently consume energy, but indicate that the conversion is technically and economically possible through the wide-scale implementation of existing technologies.
First, they analyzed the current amount and source of the fuel consumed -- coal, oil, gas, nuclear, renewables -- and calculated the fuel demands if all fuel usage were replaced with electricity. This is a significantly challenging step -- it assumes that all the cars on the road become electric, and that homes and industry convert to fully electrified heating and cooling systems.
"When we did this across all 50 states, we saw a 39 percent reduction in total end-use power demand by the year 2050," Jacobson said. "About 6 percentage points of that is gained through efficiency improvements to infrastructure, but the bulk is the result of replacing current sources and uses of combustion energy with electricity."
The next step involved figuring out how to power the new electric grid. The researchers focused on meeting each state's new power demands using only the renewable energies -- wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and tiny amounts of tidal and wave -- available to each state.
They analyzed each state's sun exposure, and how many south-facing, non-shaded rooftops could accommodate solar panels. They developed and consulted wind maps and determined whether local offshore wind turbines were an option. Geothermal energy was available at a reasonable cost for only 13 states.
The report lays out individual roadmaps for each state to achieve an 80 percent transition by...
