Ch.9 Energy

If I were to come into the position of Secretary of Energy I would choose to rather focus on finding methods to cut down the total miles people need to drive, rather than increasing miles per gallon. The issue is quite simple really, lessening the dependence that people have on their own personal vehicles will be a benefit to us all. We can accomplish this through a variety of ways, some being drastic changes to our lives as we know them and some are relatively simple.

My thoughts go like this: other countries have focused on public transportation and improved it to the point where it is more practical to take it than drive yourself. While improving the number of miles able to be traveled off the same gallon of gas would without a doubt be an improvement, in order to become fully sustainable we need to ease off of them sooner rather than later. A step forward in decreasing our reliance on personal vehicles is much more cost-effective for the average consumer and much better for the sustainability of the planet. Reinvesting money into improving the public transport system to solve the issues people usually associate with it, cleanliness, speed, and efficiency to name a few would be a great improvement to the already underutilized transport system.

The three forms of renewable energy that I will be focusing on are solar, wind, and geothermal energy. These three forms of energy were the ones that I believed would be most likely to gather the greatest amount of energy while still remaining cost-effective. Solar is a common method already used today that after further refining in the efficiency of the panels, will yield much greater numbers. I believe the best panels today are between 20%-30% efficiency which only leads me to assume that if those numbers ever reach 90% or 100% efficiency we will see a vastly different world than the one we see today. Wind energy is also another great option that works in tandem with solar. Both methods are not available 100% of the time due to there being differences in both sunlight and sometimes the wind is just not picked up. Combining these methods will prove to be very effective if implemented correctly. Finally, geothermal energy is a recent discovery with promises to deliver vast amounts of reliable energy that is drawn from the Earth's heat.

A social cost could likely come from any of these. People simply are used to the idea of having ever-present energy at a moment's notice. There is the possibility that with these methods of energy creation there could be downtime in some areas, which people will not be used to. An economic cost would be the high levels of capital required to build and implement these systems into our grid. Finally, an environmental cost could come from the amount of land that needs to be cleared in order to set up effective wind or solar farms, but I believe the benefit outweighs the cost of all of these issues.



Photo sources: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/estimating-cost-and-energy-efficiency-solar-water-heater
https://archive.epa.gov/climatechange/kids/solutions/technologies/geothermal.html