Dissertation

|1 Introduction|
1 Introduction
The exhaustive use of cheap and abundant resources was always the most important stimulus
for the industrial revolution, boosting economic growth, scientific development and social
prosperity. Considering ethical and environmental aspects secondary, society followed the call for
competitiveness, development and growth with mainly social, economical and political interests
on the agenda.
But maintaining this course is very energy intensive and becomes noticeable in a huge imbalance
of total worldwide energy consumption and regeneration. To give an example, in 2008, about
470 exajoules (4.7 ⋅ 10 20 J) of energy were used (produced from fuels), which is equivalent to an
average power production/consumption of 15 terawatts (1.5 ⋅ 10 13 W), but only the fraction of 61
exajoules (regeneration rate = 13%) came from renewable sources, which means that 87% could
not be restored (see figure 1).
[2, 3]
fuels
(fossils, nuclear, biomas, ...)
energy (re-)storage
(photosynthesis, geothermal ...)
energy consumption
(combustion, fission, ...)
61 x 10 18 J 470 x 10 18 J
waste products
(H 2 O, CO 2 , radioactives ... )
Figure 1: General energy flux diagram for the use of energy by mankind.
As a result of this modern desire for accelerated industrialization and globalization, world
population grows and raises its living standard on the expense of infamous handling of nature
and dissipative usage of resources. Every day, along with worldwide growing energy consumption,
environmental destruction and pollution increases. In the same way fossil energy resources
decrease at an ever faster rate. The exponentially growing number of energy consuming processes
counters all advances in efficiency and sustainability, with the result that half of all the energy
utilized since the beginning of the industrial revolution has been consumed within the last twenty
years. [3] Especially developing countries like India, China or Brazil will accelerate this process in
the intermediate future. [3] |1|