NAME ______
Energy Supply and Transportation Options
This theme explores your personal consumption of various forms of energy and your transportation options. Transportation commonly accounts for more than one half of all the energy that you consume (can be as high as 90% for some people). Clearly, transportation choices must be carefully weighed.
We consume energy in many ways, but all energy can be measured and compared in common units, e.g., joules or calories. The first goal of this assignment is to estimate your average daily consumption of 3 different kinds of energy:
· Energy that you obtain with food
· Energy that you use at home (heating and electricity) and
· Energy you use for transportation
There are other kinds of energy that you use every day, but we will focus on just these three. You need to estimate what total of your energy usage is accounted for by transportation. This assignment might make you think about how to cut down on your personal energy consumption.
Food
You might know your daily calorie intake (usually between 2500 and 3200 kilocalories for a grown up), or you can try to calculate it based on the number of calories mentioned on every package of food that you buy. For one day this week try to tally all the calories from all the food and drink that you have. We will assume that it is your “average” day. The numbers of “calories” on the package are actually kilocalories. Convert the total number of these “calories” into joules.
A1. I got ______“calories on the package” x 4186 = ______Joules from food
Utilities (Electricity and Heat)
Your energy bill for the last month has kW-hours of electricity consumed listed (500-600 is typical for a US household). Divide those by 30 to get the daily consumption. If you live with other people but receive one bill, divide the remainder over the number of people you have in your household. B1. kWH per month ______/ 30 = ______per day per household / ____ people = ______
B2. Multiply the remainder of B1 x 3,600,000 to get Joules: ______.
Cost of heating may be harder to estimate. First, you need to determine type of heating you have in your home. Then you need to estimate how much wood/gas/oil is used per day (call your landlord, or utility company, if necessary). Ask your landlord if you live in an apartment complex how much they spend on heating for your unit. You can calculate the total energy consumption based on the following conversion values:
· 1 pound of coal gives you 16,000,000 Joules,
· 1 pound of heating oil gives you 24,000,000 Joules,
· 100 cubic feet of average natural gas (so called cfc or approximately 1 therm) gives you 110,000,000 Joules
· wood – approximately 21,100,000 Joules per cord (128 cu. ft) or look up your exact wood type here
C1. I got ______Joules from heating.
Transportation
If you are one of the 90% of Americans who commutes alone, simply estimate how many gallons of gasoline you spend on average per day. Use weekly average, e.g., if you spend 14 gallons of gasoline/week, the average will be 14/7=2 gallons/day. If you carpool or take a bus, divide that further by the number of people in your carpool.
D1. _____ gallons per day x 130,000,000 = ______Joules
(Use 146,300,000 for diesel fuel)
If you ride the bus or carpool, see example here: Eric takes a regular city bus for 4 miles RT (8 miles total) every day with an average 4 mpg mileage (or ____ substitute your carpool vehicle mileage) and 10 people on the bus (___ in your carpool). Total bus fuel consumption for Eric would be 8 miles/4 mpg = 2 gallons, then 2 gallons/10 people = 0.2 gal of diesel fuel.
D2. ______gallons of diesel fuel x 146,300,000 Joules/gallon = ______Joules
Note: If you bike, your transportation energy is close to zero because it is part of your normal calorie intake with food. This is what makes biking so great. Your food energy consumption may be greater in this case, but not by much – e.g., assuming 2.5 mile daily RT ride (or 5 miles total) at 15 mph speed on a touring bike on a paved road (if you weigh about 150 lbs.) you spend a mere 9 kcal/minute or about 9x 20 minutes total time =180 kcal (see details at http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu:8080/~cswingle/misc/exercise.phtml) for an average 2,200 kcal/day diet this is less than 10%!
YOUR TOTAL ENERGY: A1+B2+C1+D1 or D2 = ______Joules
This is a lot of Joules! Now draw a pie chart (you can do it easily in an Excel spreadsheet ) to show the relative share of food, electricity, heating, and transportation in your personal energy consumption.
Pie chart here:
Opinion letter
You also need to write an opinion letter to a local newspaper editor (bring it to class stapled to this page, do not actually mail it) defending benefits of a mode of transportation. If your last name starts with A-O, write about how great single-driver car driving (in particular commuting) is. State all the good reasons why you could not live without your car. Also mention some negative things about the alternative transportation, why it would not work for you. If your last name starts P-Z, write on the virtues of the opposite viewpoint, that is alternative transportation. Pick ONE type, e.g., carpool, bus, bike, or light rail. What are the benefits? What are the disadvantages of the car model? You can use numbers from part 1 of this assignment to back up your statements. To ensure your letter could get attention, limit yourself to not more than 300 words. Understand that I do not ask you to state your actual opinion, I want you to be able to argue the viewpoint in question even if you personally disagree with it.