Sustainability Hunt - The Energy Exhibition

Because my class was learning about Sustainability this term at school, Mum set up a Sustainabilty Hunt for me.  When we were out and about we would try and find things to do with sustainability.

We went to the Science Museum in London and asked if there was anything we could see that would be good for our Sustainability Hunt.  The lady there suggested we should go to the Energy Centre.  So we did.

Future Energy Source Ideas

The first thing we saw were some ideas people have had about energy sources in the future.

Hydrogen

One idea was making hydrogen with a wind-powered back pack.  They used the example of a little girl called Lucy Jones.  On her birthday she got a special back pack with a little hydrogen tank on the back.  She could wear the backpack around using the wind to make hydrogen.  Then the family could use the hydrogen for energy at home.

If they made more hydrogen than their family needed they would start to make a family business  and sell it.

Poo Power

The next idea was a little icky and sticky!  The idea was to use poo for energy.  There are 3 ways you can use poo for energy.  You can burn it to make electricity, you can use it as fertilizer to grow crops and even the gasses it gives off can be used as fuel.

This is a special lunchbox Lucy Jones would use to bring her poo home from school so the family can use it for power.  If she went to a friend's house, she would give her poo to the Mum in a giftbag as a present when she left to say thank you for having her.

This sounds really gross, but actually in rural China, long ago poo was used for fertilizer on the crops.  Even today sometimes poo is used as a thank you gift by guests who come for dinner.  The idea behind that is so they can return the nutrients from the food back to the soil. 

Also people living in Denmark can put their poo out for the bin men and they collect it to use as compost.

Minster of Energy

In this computer game the Prime Minister made me the Minister of Energy.  I was in charge of a country's energy.  I had to choose what kind of power stations and where to put them to make enough power for everyone to live.  I had to choose between lots of different energy sources such as wind, waves, solar, hydro (water), gas, nuclear and oil and coal.  I was in charge for several years.  On my first turn the Prime Minister told me that I was very rubbish and fired me!  Luckily I learnt about resilience in our class so I gave it a few more tries until I got to keep my job.

I learnt that:

• The gas, oil and coal gave lots of electricity but they also polluted the air and so people weren't happy with them.
• Nuclear gave the highest energy but the people were very unhappy about it.  This is because in the past terrible accidents have happened that have made people very sick and done lots of damage to the environment.
• Even using renewable sources like waves could still damage the environment.
• You really need to think about where to put things like solar power because sometimes it's not that sunny in places.

Energy Ninjas

The next game I played was called Energy Ninjas.  They were looking at ways to reduce CO2 emissions because they damage the environment.

Here are some ways to reduce CO2 emissions...

• You can put devices on chimneys to filter the gases.
• Wear more clothes and turn down heating.
• Buy more electric cars.
• Burn less wood
• Use trains instead of planes 

Using Less Energy

This was a fun activity where you got answer a question by choosing the best picture.  To choose the picture you had to turn a big wheel until the picture showed on the screen.  The questions were things like "which of these transports uses less power?"  or "which food uses the smallest amount of energy to get from where it's grown to your lunchbox?"

I loved learning about energy and I'm going to try to help our family at home to make better choices about energy.