| Genre | documentary film |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
Switch begins in Norway, where Dr. Tinker explores an electricity system built on renewable hydropower. There, he asks the central question of the film: what will the energy transition look like for the rest of us. Over the following 90 minutes, he travels the world to find out. His first step is to calculate how much energy the average person uses in a year, including all the energy embodied in the food and products we consume, the roads and public buildings we share. He uses that figure to measure and compare each energy type he visits.
Tinker starts with the big conventional energies, coal and oil, trying to determine their futures. Can coal be clean? Will we keep using it? Will oil price keep rising? Will we run out of it? He then examines the energies that may replace them. For oil, those are biofuels, natural gas and electricity. For coal, they are geothermal, solar, wind, natural gas and nuclear.
With each type, he visits various facilities, talks to the experts in the Department of Energy, universities, and gives an analysis of each resource’s major pros and cons.
After his journey, he assembles his findings to map out the likely energy future. While coal and oil will continue to play a large role especially in developing countries, a global transition to where their alternatives become dominant will happen in about 50 years. Renewables see by far the largest growth rate, while natural gas makes up the largest portion of the replacement, with nuclear approximately equal in share to renewables.
Tinker ends by emphasizing that energy efficiency, including personal energy conservation, will play a vital and growing role in a successful energy future: “The most important thing is to change the way we think about energy, so we can change the way we use it.”