Quote:
Originally Posted by Ronald Brak
China doubled their generating capacity in five years from 2000-2005. The United States has doubled its electricity generating capacity within a decade in the past. Due to the greater efficiency of electric motors electrifying all US cars and trucks would increase electrical consumption very roughly by a third. If the US expanded its generating capacity at roughly the same rate it did in the 60s it would take about three years to expand capacity by a third.
Note I'm not saying I think this will happen, I'm pointing out that it did happen in the past and I'll mention that during the time it happened electricity prices fell in real terms.
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I don't know about the US, but China doubled its capacity by exploiting cheap coal. When that runs out, they are in pretty serious trouble. IMHO, for the sake of the environment and the Chinese population we ought to be sending our best reactor technology their way so they can develop and modernise without relying on dirty and very finite fossil fuels. They've already got the bomb so there is no proliferation issue. But that is an aside.
I've done some quick calculations, taking the world energy consumption to be 80.29 million barrels per day, one barrel of oil to be 6.113 gigajoules, and current global nuclear energy capacity at 300 gigawatts:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=((6.113*10^9+*+80.290+*+10^6)+joule s%2Fday)%2F300+gigawatts+*+100&btnG=Google+Search& meta=
By that calculation, nuclear energy needs to expand globally by 1894% to meet just the demands of the current population, at their current level of consumption. Even doubling every 5 years (which would be a lot harder with nuclear than coal of course) that would take over 20 years. By which time the worlds population will be much larger and the populations of India and China will be demanding more energy to allow them to enjoy a western standard of living.
(I'm focusing on nuclear power as I have serious doubts as to whether the huge amount of energy we require can be found from renewables such as wind and solar)
Given the scope of the challenge I don't think I am being alarmist, and to bring it back to the topic of this thread; its going to make mass space travel extremely difficult. To put people into orbit and beyond on a regular basis and in large numbers will require extra capacity on top of what is needed. However, if we meet the challenge of supplying enough energy for the human race to survive and prosper, perhaps we can use the momentum of such a project to expand our capacity to allow an interplanetary civilisation to function.