Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
our dependence on unstable Middle-East sources of oil, their
main concern being to continue their current lifestyles with as
few disturbances as possible. Only a few would mention anything
about ecological overload, climate change, peak oil, sustainability
or the needs of future generations. And yet it is the latter factors
that are really critical to understanding the urgent need for more
renewable energy. Interestingly, these are precisely the kinds of
argument you will hear from those who actually started the wind
power adventure. They had an intuitive understanding of the need
for clean energy if our civilisation is to survive and thrive—people
like my good friend Preben Maegaard, who made the vision of a
sustainable future the driving force in his life's work as far back
as 1970. Today, if you could make a search engine to seek out the
greatest concentration of windmills in the world, it would lead
you to Preben at his Nordic Folkecenter for Renewable Energy
in northwest Denmark. Let us now look at the arguments for
increased investment in renewables, and particularly in wind
power.
1.1
Ecological Overload
A useful quantitative measure of the degree of sustainability of a
region is the so-called “ecological footprint”. While it is a rough
measure, it is the most useful tool we have at this time for the impact
of human societies on the environment. The ecological footprint
measures the amount of land that would be required by the
population of a region in order to provide the renewable resources
consumed and the sinks to absorb waste products. This measure
is now widely used. Data are published regularly by the World
Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) for 150 nations in their
Living
Planet
[1].
In the period 1961-2008, the total footprint increased from
approximately 53% to 150%, as shown in Fig. 1.1. The 2008 level
thus corresponded to an overshoot of roughly 50%. The overshoot
is probably closer to 60% in 2013. WWF figures are about three
years behind for data collection reasons, but our footprint is
thought to be growing by 2% per year.
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