ENERGY CONSUMPTION

Energy Consumption

Energy Consumption

As humanity has progressed energy has become increasingly important to everyday life. Energy is needed to provide services such as transportation, powering factories to provide goods and even to supply households with light and heat and as we further progresses there is a growing fear that there are not enough resources to sustain our need to consume energy. This essay looks at the trends of energy consumption in the United Kingdom over the past 30 years and considers what measures, if any, are need to be taken to ensure the sustainability of this energy consumption in the future.

The United Nations' Brundtland Commission defined the term 'sustainability' as: 'Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs. 'This suggests that the United Kingdom must have sufficient recoverable portions of resources known as 'reserves', (I.E. Oil in the ground is not a reserve unless it is economically recoverable), which can be converted into energy to accommodate the power requirements at this point in time as well as to accommodate requirements of the future. Resources can be broken up into two groups, primary sources and secondary sources. The National Energy Foundation defines a primary resource as:' A substance that occurs in nature and can be used to produce energy, such as coal, oil, U-235, ect'.

Space and water heating is the largest consumer of energy in the domestic sector consuming 82% of all delivered energy to households in the year 2000. Between 1970 and 2000 the amount of energy employed by space heating inflated by 24% and 15% for water heating. This can partly be explained by the increased trend of one-person households and the preferred type of household. As life expectances have risen there has been an increase of 15% between 1970 and 2000 in the number of one-person residences, which are less efficient than having multiple persons in a single house. There has also been an increase in the average household internal temperature from 13 °C in 1970 to 18 °C in 2000 despite and external temperature increase of 1.4 °C. The energy consumed in the industrial sector accounted for one quarter of all consumed energy in the U.K. in the year 2005 consuming 58.2 million tonnes of oil equivalent. The amount of energy consumed by this sector has fallen 35% between the years of 1970 and 2005 ...