Students from around the world calculated their class mean and standard deviations for their footprints and posted them on our world map.
Do you see differences across the globe? If so, why do you think those differences exist?
Did you use the calculator to try to reduce your footprint down to the average from a citizen of another country? What changes would you have to make to lower your footprint in this way? Are you going to try and take some of these actions in your daily life?
Student Footprints >
Conditional Clean Energy
If we look at fuels that we use regularly such as ethanol. We can observe that the production of ethanol requires high amounts of energy which regularly comes from fossil fuels. Could efficiency increases in Solar Power, Wind Power, Thermoelectric and Nuclear Powers allow us to generate cleaner burns without the need for fossil fuels. A similar process could be used for electrolysis to generate clean hydrogen gas that when burned, turns back into water.
Numbers:
Thermoelectric: 10% energy reclamation from lost heat energy
Nuclear: 80 -90 percent efficient
Solar: Up to 25% efficient
Wind: Up to 45% efficient
the efficiency of ethanol depends a lot on the source. Corn ethanol which is the main source in the USA is very inefficient. Sugar cane ethanol, which is the main source in South America is much more efficient.