Energy Power Alternatives
Electricity is Our Friend - Or is It?
In 2002 the Unites States of America used 97 Quads of energy which is the equivalent of 97,000,000,000,000,000 btu or 2,800,000,000,000,000 kWh. This is an amount of energy almost beyond comprehension. What is worse is that we WASTED 57.9% OR MORE of this energy became waste heat!!!
An astounding 87.6% of this energy came from fossil fuels including oil, coal, and natural gas.
For over a century, electricity has been distributed to homes and businesses to provide lighting, heating, and cooling, and to drive motors, industrial equipments, and in recent years, computers.
Electricity is a convenient means of distributing energy and it seems clean, neat and efficient to the users of electrical products and appliances. However, the TRUTH is that electricity generation is one of the most wasteful and polluting industrial processes in our current society.
Oil, coal and natural gas represent millions of years of solar energy captured by plants and micro-organisms and captured under ground for us to use. Fossil fuels are an amazing resource that has allowed us to develop an amazing society with an electrical power grid at its heart. Approximately 39.4% of the 2002 US Total Energy Consumption went into making electricity, while only about 27.9% went into transportation!!
Approximately half of the electricity produced in the United States is made by burning coal to create heat. This heat is converted to mechanical work by heat engines at an efficiency of not more than 40%, typically 35%. The mechanical work is then converted to electricity by electromechanical generators with a typical 90% efficiency. Thus, 66-68.6% of the energy available in coal has already been lost in producing the electricity.
The electricity is then distributed through an electrical grid where a further 20% or more of the energy is lost and in the end not more than 25% of the energy available in coal is lost as waste heat.
The electrical appliances that we use are often inefficient. Common motors in products such as vacuum cleaners and fans typically operate at 50% to 65% efficiency thereby create yet more waste heat which is then pumped outside by air conditioning systems running on electricity.
The efficiency of solar photovoltaic systems is typically below 15% and must therefore be very large to produce useful amounts of electricity which would be distributed by inefficient networks. Photovoltaic panels are expensive because huge amounts of energy must be used to create them. This makes large scale adoption of photovoltaics to replace our existing electrical generation infrastructure a bad idea.
A BETTER SOLUTION IS AVAILABLE WITH CURRENT TECHNOLOGY AND OUR EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE. Whenever possible, use solar energy as heat directly. Drive heating and cooling systems directly with the heat from the sun rather than converting it to electricity. If coal is to be used, burn it in an efficient generator co-located with a home or business that can use the waste heat thereby increasing the efficiency of coal use from 25% to produce electricity to 95% or better to create electricity, hot water, space heating and space cooling.
Our society will continue to use electricity … But we should use it wisely.
We should divert electricity away from space heating, hot water heating, space cooling, and refrigeration which would dramatically reduce our energy consumption.
We should insist on high efficiency mercury free alternatives to incandescent light bulbs.
We should purchase appliances with electrical motors having an efficiency of at least 85%.
We can make a significant difference NOW and we SHOULD.
Electricity can be our friend if used wisely.
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