Sustanable Energy and the Future Essay

Future of Energy: Guiding Decisions With Evidence

In order to reduce the negative environmental impacts of an ever growing human population and increasing demands for energy as technological advances continue, individual countries, states, cities and even households have the opportunity to shift their energy sources to those that are renewable. However, not all locations are equally amenable to any particular form of energy. This analysis will look at personal consumption of energy of the course of a normal routine and attempt to determine the major sources of energy use that are present in my life. It was found that heating and cooling and transportation were among the leading items that contributed to my total energy consumption. There are various ways in which these energy consumption sources could be minimized to create a better conservation of energy strategy in my normal routine.

Energy Consumption

The world is facing environmental crises from a variety of different sources. Many of these ecological issues are driven by the world's growing human population, which is expected to reach over nine billion people before it finally peaks, due to the fact that has been exponentially growing for millennia (Kunzig, 2014). The growing human population was previously expected to peak and level off at much lower rates, however demographers now believe there could be more growth that previously expected. The previous estimates of population growth were alarming already, however higher total population estimate underscore the importance that all of us reduce our environmental footprints as soon as possible.

Heating and cooling costs can be one of the greatest expenses relative to maintaining a residence and in the future, these costs could grow even higher. This trend will be driven by the fact that energy demand will continue to grow which will cause energy prices rise due to the fact that the cheapest sources of energy are non-renewable and are directly linked to climate change. However, although energy costs are likely the largest source of my personal energy consumption, this energy source may no longer be the largest energy consumption factor for the population on the whole. The use of energy of appliances, electronics, and lighting has grown rapidly in recent generations and is estimated to have overtaken the use of energy to heat and cool different residences.

Figure 1 - EIA Estimate of Total Energy Use (EIA, 2013)

Energy also represents 30% of operating expenses in a typical office building; this is the single largest and most manageable operating expense in the provision of office space (Eichholtz, Kok, & Quigley, 2009).…