Scale – Video
Summary
This video on energy scale explains why the world’s energy systems are slow to change. It highlights the immense size of energy infrastructure and its direct link to global population and personal consumption. The video suggests that managing energy demand is a key way to influence the scale of these systems and drive change.
Coming Soon – January 2026
This popular Switch Classroom video is one of our all-time teacher and student favorites. It’s being completely remade with the latest data, new visuals, and updated insights so you’ll have even more engaging, accurate content for your classroom.
Transcript:
[Dr. Scott W. Tinker] Scale is the one energy challenge that drives all others, and we are the solution. You and I. The world of energy is slow to change because the scale of infrastructure is so massive. It often takes a decade to build facilities, longer to pay off the debt, and they last for 25, 50, or even 100 years. This means that taking a game-changing technology from the lab to rolling it out at the huge industrial scale where it can make a difference takes dozens of years. We saw this time and again in countries that had transformed their energy systems. It took Iceland 35 years to get half its energy from geothermal. France 30 years to get 80% of their electricity from nuclear. Denmark, 35 years to get 20% of their electricity from wind. Because the scale of energy is so huge, emissions are also often huge. Large enough that they can have long-lasting impacts on a global scale. The same goes for water use and other kinds of environmental impacts. Big challenges, to be sure. And the scale of energy is huge for two simple reasons. The first is population. In the film, we measure energy not in kilowatts or barrels, but in people. Because there are 5.4 billion energy consumers on this planet, and another 1.6 billion who don’t yet have electricity but desperately want it. The number of energy consumers will continue to rise. The second reason is how much energy we each consume. The global average is 20 million watt hours per year, and rising. The US average is almost five times that. Population times personal consumption. That’s the reason for the staggering scale of energy. We are the challenge. We are also the solution. We can manage scale by managing demand. See the film and other parts of the website for more on efficiency.