Energy

 

Session 9

 

The topic for discussion in today’s class was fossil fuels and how its availability is consistently depleting, leading to an unsustainable future. As Professor Shahi said, if the entire world consumed as much energy as the average Singaporean and US resident, the world’s oil reserves would be depleted in 9 years. One of the solutions to this problem is renewable energy, which stems from our environment’s natural resources, which includes heat, geothermal energy, and so on.

The interesting part of the class for me was the presentations. One of the presenters talked about how tornadoes could be produced to create energy. This was particularly interesting because tornadoes, more known as calamities now can actually be a source of energy that can supply power for homes, communities, and more. Another concept that was interesting was anti-matter, which essentially is one of the more risky ventures when it comes to energy, but its possibility for power is enormous.

A key take away for me was really more of how the Sun could be a major player when it came to providing renewable energy as we are currently only using only a fraction of what the Sun is providing. Also, the concept of ocean wind farms was also a great idea that I had never come across; as such technology enables us to save space on land but at the same time still power and provide energy. Another concept that I found interesting was that Singapore was using solar power to also try to reduce its power consumption. This just goes to show how much energy is not so readily available anymore.

The issue, which I wished could have been discussed more, was the use of biofuel coming from vegetables, plants and other organisms. I think that there is a huge potential in using some of the things we eat and harvest and convert it into fuel and energy. Unfortunately, no one really got to touch upon this.

Overall I give the session a 7/10. The discussions were not really in depth but it gave me some insight on what could be better with regards to energy.