Energy illiteracy

"Energy illiteracy" or "Energy blindness" means that people hearing about a certain quantity or volume of energy have no idea how to compare with another form of energy. It can be stated that over 99% of the world's population is energy illiterate.

Weight and Length literacy:

If you hear that somebody is 2,5meter tall and has a bodyweight of 40kg; you will directly be able to visualize the person's body shape without seeing the person. This means that you are weight and length literate; you know what the numbers mean and you can visualize the numbers and place them into a context.

If you hear that somebody has eaten 5kJ (kiloJoule) for breakfast or that a certain car consumes 5MJ (MegaJoule) per km than most people have no clue at all if those amounts are a lot or a little; nobody can place those numbers into a context and that is what is meant with "energy illiteracy"

How to eradicate energy illiteracy?
The solution is simple; the reason why most people are length an weight literate is because we always use the same units for lenght and weight; measuring the height of a door or your body or the lenght of a table we all measure in the same units. The same for measuring weight for food and building materials and your own body weight are all measured in the same unit.

The unit for energy is Joule and all forms of energy; fuel, coal, gas, wood, electrity, heat can all be expressed in Joule. A grown up human being needs between 6 to 8 MJ (MegaJoule) per day and an average fuel-burning car consumes 5MJ per km.

Did you know:
That Gasoline contains 34,6 MJ per liter and Diesel 38,7 MJ per liter and Biofuel around 30,5 MJ per liter and Ethanol only 20,5 MJ per liter. Dont be surprised if a car converted to ethanol almost uses double the amount of liters; because what you need is energy and not liters; and the unit of energy is Joule.

Did you know:
That the wattage of a certain electric appliance does not say anything about the energy consumption of the appliance.
It can be that a refridgerator of 70Watt consumes more Energy than a 100Watt fridge. How can this be? The Wattage of an electric device tells you only how much energy it consumes per second (Watt Joule per second) and that is not enough information to tell energy consumption in an hour or a day. A refridgerator switches on and off all the time and let's assume that a 70W fridge is on for 3000 seconds per hour than this results in an energy consumption of 70J/s x 3000s/h x 24h/day 5.040.000Joules (5MJ) per day. If the 100W fridge only is on for 1000 seconds per hour than the energy consumption is 100J/s x 1000s/h x 24h/day 2.400.000 (=2,4MJ) per day; which is less than half the consumption of the 70W fridge. You see Watt information can mislead you badly and thus it is high time to start implementing energy information on electric devices instead of "power-information".

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu