Energy Studies for ENVS/ESCI Majors:
The biggest environmental problem facing the United States and the rest of the world lies
in finding a new energy economy, one that is no longer dependent upon our dwindling
fossil fuel resources. Any student engaged in Environmental Studies or Environmental
Science would be well served to become as educated in this area as possible. There are
many new career pathways opening up in energy studies (management, policy, etc).
Unfortunately, there are rather few courses at the UO that offer this kind of curriculum.
ENVS 350 is one of them and this course should be taken by ENV majors especially.
The current low enrollment in this class indicates a disinterest in this overall important
topic and therefore serves as a disincentive for the program to offer this course.
The focus of this course, therefore, will be to examine competing alternative energy
technologies from the physical, social, economic and humanistic point of view, all within
a context of regional energy production in the United States. This course will also touch
on the societal/cultural barriers to energy conservation, since clearly, our energy future
also depends on our ability to act more conscientiously and cooperatively. Emerging
technologies such as solar photovoltaic cells, improved wind turbines, advanced gas
turbines, hydrogen fuel cells, efficient biomass co-generation facilities, improved energy
storage capacity in batteries, and ocean thermal electric conversion heat engines, offer us
a wide array of choices for alternative means to derive energy. Yet each of these new
forms of energy generation has a different environmental and ecological impact and thus
this array of choices needs to be evaluated objectively and fairly.
Currently each form of alternative energy has a passionate set of advocates that insist
their form is the "solution". The reality is that regional combinations of different
technologies are the only real solution - there is no one answer. The problem is complex
at all levels. There are engineering challenges, infrastructure challenges, political
challenges, economic consequence, and cultural impediments. In this course, the intent is
to perform an objective cost-benefit analysis on each form of alternative energy in order
to determine its feasibility on some regional scale.
The main goals of this class are to:
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To critically analyze various aspects of our national energy policy.
To gain an understanding of the cost-benefit ratio of various alternative energy
sources to see what is feasible in individual regions within the US and what is not.
To understand some of the various obstacles associated with actual
implementation of production line alternative energy facilities.
To do simple calculations regarding the cost of energy usage and the required
infrastructure to deliver a certain amount of power.
To gain an understanding of how difficult it is to overcome culture barriers, kneejerk reactions and the prevalent NIMBY attitude to actually come up with a
working solution.
Student workload will be moderate consisting of small scale individual and group
research assignments. The first time this course was offered, a large scale terminal group
project was a major component of the workload. In the end, that project proved to be
untenable and therefore that assignment will not be a component of next term’s class.
However, regardless of the workload, this class is one of the few opportunities available
to ENVS students to study a real environmental problem, in depth at a critical level. To
put it in perspective a) the current rate of growth of the Chinese fossil fuel economy
means that by the year 2015, China will be outputting more greenhouse gas emissions
than the United States b) Canada has the capacity to become the next middle east of fossil
fuels by “mining” the Athabascan tar sands. This mining operation will leave a 300 x
200 x 1 km scar on the planet, easily visible from space: c) the United States has no
serious alternative energy plan – the extant plan is continued reliance on coal fired
electricity and imported Liquified Natural Gas from Iran and Russia; d) americans
currently use 400 million gallons of gasoline a day at a cosdt of $1billion and this mode
of operation continues, unabated. Real alternatives to this madness exist now and the
more you are aware of them, the higher probability that they will be implemented.