oikos
OIKOS: WATER AND ENERGY
The growing consumption of fossil fuels, dwindling petrol reserves, the continuous pollution of the atmosphere and water, and climatic change resulting from human activities are issues that have been neglected for too long although they have caused great debate. The current situation will have severe consequences in the future according to estimated growth in an environment conditioned by numerous variables, many of which are determined by human activity. Accelerated population increase, the rising price of fuel, the pollution of the environment and its consequences on the ozone layer, carbon dioxide and methane, global warming, the disturbance of precipitation patterns, glacier melting, etc. are all interlinked threats that we need to understand and minimise.
Solutions must be technically and scientifically feasible as well as economically sustainable in our economic and political environment. The availability of water and energy in the near future are inextricably linked to research and technical development in order to capture, transform and recycle energy. Both assets are as indispensable as they are unequally distributed across the population, part of which has often considered them to be free and infinite. Thus, a change is needed in habits and usage of these assets, which are vital for life, and largely determine the viability of the technically feasible alternatives.
The issue was originally tackled by scientists, but now the general public are also exerting pressure for increasingly urgent solutions on political and economic entities with decision-making powers. The general public is demanding that methods and programmes are established to ensure that the resources are in place to provide mankind with the water and energy necessary to maintain and improve our quality of life. The pollution of the atmosphere and water, the exhaustion of fossil fuels and other mineral resources, population increase, the demands of consumerism, production growth and economic profits are factors on a global scale that must be taken tackled with local decisions, as partial relief to problems which may be very acute in certain areas.
The energy requirements of a house can be divided into two basic segments: the first is energy for thermal appliances, especially heating, hot water and refrigeration; the second is energy for all other electrical appliances such as lighting, household electrical appliances, communications appliances, etc. It is estimated that around 70% of household energy corresponds to the first category of thermal consumption whereas only 30% is needed for powering the rest of the electrical appliances.
The use of electrical energy to power an electrical heater can only be beaten in terms of inefficiency by heating the room with the windows open. Possible alternatives are the conversion of solar power into electricity by means of concentration plants or the natural development of biofuels, taking advantage of the function of chlorophyll in green plants. However, these options are not very efficient in terms of energy generated and energy received.
The inefficiency of this energy is increased by the fact that the transformation, storage and transmission processes often mean that notable amounts of energy are lost. Two easy and unusual factors must govern the design of any energy system, especially in the household sector:
- The points of energy generation and use must be as close as possible, in terms of distance and timing, and in the number of transformations required from the former to the latter.
- The transformation processes must coincide with the entropic degradation of the energy as much as possible, reusing residual energy via reinsertion in the system at each step.
On the Iberian Peninsula, more than three thousand times the energy consumed is received from the sun.
Our household, transport and industrial energy needs could be met by using the proper technology to capture, transform and store the energy received in the exteriors of buildings or other artificial surfaces. The technology to capture the suns heat to use for heating and hot water or electricity generation using photovoltaic cells is well known. This is possible if we receive enough solar energy in summer and during the day to meet our heating and artificial lighting needs in winter and during the night.
After two centuries of wasting our naturally accumulated energy resources such as fossil fuels, a drastic change is needed to find a new balance in the use of our energy resources. The storage and proper management of a plentiful and cheap energy, such as solar power, combined with the development of methods of reasonable cost for its application in construction, are necessary and accessible tools in the short term. Geothermal accumulation and phase change materials, the generation and storage of hydrogen, and the use of direct conversion electrochemical elements such as fuel batteries, photovoltaic capture with polymeric elements or thin layer coverings etc, are techniques to use which will form together in the OIKOS square to gain a new concept of energy for the household sector.