Special CBE Seminar on Sustainable Energy and Society this Thursday, 6/13 at 1 PM in Boggs 239

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering will host a special seminar on Thursday, 6/13: Dr. Thomas Beck from the University of Cincinnati will be presenting a talk on Sustainable Energy and Society.

Energy is in the news every day. We hear one day that renewable energy is on an exponential growth curve, while the next day we hear that fossil fuels are here to stay for the foreseeable future. This talk grew out of a freshman seminar course at the University of Cincinnati on Sustainable Energy and Society. That course gave an overview of modern energy usage and its consequences. A key feature of the course was the importance of estimation skills for analyzing basic issues related to energy in our culture.  Two themes emerged: 1) It is important to start the analysis at the human scale through estimating personal energy usage. Two helpful "units" of energy that people can immediately relate to are the gallon of gasoline and the kilowatt-hour of electrical energy (1 gallon of gas provides the equivalent of 33 kWh of electrical energy) and 2) dimensional analysis and simple scaling provide the tools to scale up to societal levels. Putting the results together can help assess which future forms of energy production are the most likely to prevail, and what it will take to make the required transition.

Dr. Beck is a Professor of Chemistry and Head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cincinnati working on specific ion effects, computational chemistry methods, liquid interfaces, and biophysics.

This special seminar will be held at 1:00 PM in Boggs 239 on Thursday, June 13th.