Global Warming: Energy, Environmental Pollution, and the Impact of Power Electronics

Energy and environment, particularly the global warming problem due to man-made greenhouse gases (GHGs), appear to be such a serious concern in our society that almost everybody in the world today is talking about it. The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the United Nations--Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) along with the former U.S. Vice President Al Gore for their contributions to global warming. There is no doubt that energy has been the lifeblood in the evolution of our industrial civilization, and per capita energy consumption has been the barometer of a nation's prosperity. In the old days of the preindustrial revolution era, as indicated in Figure 1, mankind was mainly dependent on animal and manual labor. In this muscle age, our life style was very simple and unsophisticated, and the environment was clean. In 1785, James Watt of Scotland invented the steam engine that ushered in the Industrial Revolution, and we were brought into the mechanical age or age of machines. The Industrial Revolution gained momentum by the invention of internal combustion engine in the late 19th century. The wave of the Industrial Revolution gradually spread from Europe to the United States, and then to the rest of the world. The electrical revolution or electrical age started by the commercial availability of electricity in the mid-1880s, when at the same time, the commercial induction motor was invented (1888) by Nickola Tesla. The commercial dc motor was introduced at a slightly earlier date (1873), and then the synchronous motor arrived at a slightly later date (1891). The electronics revolution or the age of modern solid-state electronics was ushered in by the invention of the transistor in 1948 by Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley of Bell Laboratories. Bell Laboratories also invented the thyristor (called the PNPN triggering transistor) in 1956, and then the thyristor (or silicon controlled rectifier) was commercially introduced by General Electric (GE) in 1958. This brought us to the modern age of solid-state power electronics. We often say that invention of the transistor brought in the first electronics revolution, whereas the invention of the thyristor brought in the second electronics revolution. Gradually, the eras of integrated circuits, computers, communication, and robotics arrived. We now live in an Internet age that shrank the world into a global village. Human society is now more interdependent than ever. During the mechanical, electrical, and electronics ages, the energy consumption in the world has grown by leaps and bounds to cater the need of growing world population and improvement of our standard of living. So far, we have hardly paid much attention to the adverse effect of energy consumption, i.e., environmental pollution.