After watching “Powering the Planet” by Nate Lewis, it has become apparent that we are facing an energy crisis. Worldwide, we are currently using 13 TW of energy a year, and that number is expected to reach 28 TW by 2050. The US alone uses 3 TW of energy a year! I didn’t believe the statistics at first, I thought the US used more than only 25% of the global annual energy.
One of the interesting facts Nate Lewis brings up is that if we were to compensate for the extra 10 TW solely on Nuclear Energy, we would need to build 10,000 more 1GW Nuclear Reactors by 2050, literally a nuclear reactor every other day for the next 50 years. This shows that we can not rely on nuclear power alone. Nate Lewis also goes into to showing the feasibility of deploying carbon less primary energy sources such as how a huge 250 square mile or so solar cell in the midwest could power the US continuously if we were able to find out a feasible way of storing the energy over night.
All in all, I found this lecture really interesting and will probably be modeling my senior project investment video on the techniques that Nate Lewis used such as using thought provoking statistics to get a point across.
