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Cambridge ideas transforming
tomorrow I heard politicians and BBC
discussing what to do about energy waste
in Britain they say things like let's
reduce the number of plastic bags in
supermarkets they say switch off your
phone charger when you're not using it
and the idea that these are the number
one things we should be talking about
when we're addressing the energy problem
it drove me
crazy this is twaddle and it's
distracting us from talking about
serious change that would actually make
a
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difference my name's David maai I'm a
physicist like everyone else I'm
addicted to energy I use electricity
my electricity is coming from coal and
gas power stations but we need to get
off fossil fuels because coal gas oils
are going to run
out so how do we get off fossil
fuels this is a 40 W light bulb if you
leave it on all the time it uses 1 kwatt
hour every day and it's possible to
express all forms of power consumption
using this unit of the light bulb
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I started measuring everything around my
house around my office and I found some
surprising things first I plugged in a
phone charger and it didn't even
register on this power meter it uses
100th of a light bulb of power so I
don't think the phone charg is going to
be our number one form of energy
consumption just taking one bath every
day uses the same energy same power as
five light bulbs on all the time
Non-Stop and I found I've been steadily
using 40 light bulbs worth of gas for
heating making hot air and hot water and
that surprised
me transport is one of the biggest forms
of energy consumption it uses about a
third of our energy if you drive an
average car 50 km a day that corresponds
to having 40 light bulbs on all the
time today the average British person is
using 125 light bulbs of power that's
125 light bulbs on all the time
non-stop that's
huge I started tinkering around trying
to reduce my energy consumption seeing
what happened if I unplugged electrical
devices and what about playing with a
thermostat how much could I
save turning down the thermostat 1
degree will make a difference so it will
reduce your energy consumption by 10% or
so at home but that's not enough to
solve our energy problem individual
actions alone won't get us where we need
to go but what the climate scientists
advise us is we should be looking for
90% reductions we need to be talking
about sweeping National changes to the
way we use
energy so what can we do
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power sources with the biggest potential
in brishan are nuclear power and
renewable power sources the renewable
with the biggest potential is
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wind 200 people can be completely
powered by one of
these the government's only given
permission to put up four light bulbs
per person worth of wind farms so
clearly that's not enough given that
we're using 125 today they're not
putting them up fast
enough this is Sewell B it produces 4/10
of a light bulb of power for every
person in Britain that's more than all
the wind farms in Britain
today if you don't like nuclear every
size well you want to to get rid of you
need an extra 2,000 wind
turbin we could technically live
entirely on nuclear power it just need a
remarkable number of nuclear power
stations Britain's Got impressive wave
and tidal resources but if you covered
the entire Coastline of Britain with
wave machines you would only get four
light bulbs of power per person from
wave power
well it makes me pretty angry if people
are anti-wind and anti-nuclear and
anti-al it just doesn't make sense what
do they want to have happen when they
switch the light switch
on at the moment we get 90% of our
energy from fossil fuels and we've
become used to that obviously if we stop
using fossil fuels then everything else
we do has to roughly increase tfold to
make up from the loss of the fossil
fuels so obviously audacious things have
to happen we need to be talking about a
10-fold increase in nucle clear a
10-fold increase in wind a 10-fold
increase in everything that that we
currently
do the advice from the climate
scientists is we need to essentially get
off fossil fuels by
2050 and that means it's possible as
long as we get building now
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