Hello, this is the first module for Energy 101.
And what we'll focus on in this module is energy and society, because our society
is the driver for the energy that we have to use.
If we back up and take a real big picture look at energy flow in society, we see
that we as a society want energy and we'll get into exactly what that means
here in a few minutes. But, you, we can't create that energy out
of nothing. We have to get it from a natural energy
resource that occurs naturally on the earth, but then we have to use energy
conversion technology as an infinate of. Massive infrastructure in order to
provide the energy that society uses. So the energy used by society is the
driver, that's the tail that wags the entire dog of energy.
It's what has created all of the opportunities, all of the costs and the
environmental impact. That is due to energy today.
So, let's focus on the tail that wags the dog.
How society uses energy. And why we use it, and why we want it.
Okay? So we're seeing why society wants energy.
And we split it into 3 major sectors. Building comfort, manufacturing goods,
and transportation. And that's the tail that wags the dog
that creates the need for all the backup that's required to supply that energy,
the energy to society. Well how how much does each one of these
sectors use. [SOUND].
Well, it's fairly equal, if you look at this pie chart.
We see that the largest consumer of our energy, in the US, is buildings.
The residences, our homes, the shops, the office buildings.
That consumes about 41% of the total energy consumed in this country.
41%, little more than a 1/3, less the 1/2, 41%.
The next largest user of energy in our country is manufacturing.
Manufacturing cars, manufacturing goods, that uses approximately a 1/3 again, 31%.
That's the red sector. And the 3rd sector, transportation, is
28%, again about 5% less than a third. So you can roughly say that they're split
about a third and a third and a third, with building being a little more,
transportation being a little less. So let's dive a little deeper now into
what we mean by buildings use energy. What kinds of energy does buildings need?
What kind of energy does manufacturing need? What kind of energy does
transportation need? Because there are different forms of energy that we would
like to have, and we want to use as we go about our daily lives.
In a society that's built on hundreds of years of utilizing energy.
Well, one of category of energy that all of these sectors used, is heat.
Building comfort, we don't like to afford to be 20 degrees inside our house when
it's 20 degrees outside. So, we want to heat the indoor air.
That takes energy to do that. We also don't like it being 95 degrees
inside when it's 95 degrees outside. I happened to grow up in South Florida,
before the advent of massive air conditioning.
So I know what it's like to live in a hot climate without air conditioning.
But that's not the norm today. We like to be cool.
We've gotten so adapted to it, as a matter of fact, we really aren't adjusted
to very much hot weather. Manufacturing, we have to heat things up
to manufacture them. Steel, when you manufacture steel, uses a
lot energy. You've got to melt the steel.
Glass you have to use a lot of energy as you might imagine.
Another big need for energy in manufacturing sector are things like
drying carpets. When you make carpet you, you dye it.
Then you have to dry it, drying is a very large energy consumer in
in manufacturing processes and it's one that we are trying to improve the
technology on to in order to reduce the amount of energy required to dry.
products, during the manufacturing process.
Obviously, cooking, we don't think much about it, we just take it for granted,
but that was one of the earliest uses, uses for energy.
The caveman started cooking his food. He didn't used to do that.
He used to burn wood. In order to cook anything, wood is a
biomass. We'll sell, we' see that biomass is one
of the big renewable energies that we actually use today, later on.
Hot water, we don't like cold showers. We like hot water.
We want to wash our clothes in hot water. We want to Wash dishes in hot water.
So we need a lot of heat in all of these sectors.
What about work, work is a form that we need; things like pushing a car.
You know that it takes a lot of work if your car stalls and you have to push it
out of the middle of the intersection. Some people generally have to help you.
You have to push with a pretty good force in order to roll the car forward even at
a very slow speed. So when you push on something with a
force and move it through a distance that is the Basic definition of work.
So transportation to push all our cars around, to push the airplanes around, the
trains around requires a lot of work. That is the form of energy that we use a
lot of. Pumping water.
Well who does pumping water use work? Well it takes work to rotate a shaft.
Rotating the shaft with a torque is a basic definition of work, and when you
turn the tap on in your house or turn the shower head on to get water, you don't
realize how much energy is being used back at the water plant to pump the water
from a lake or from a deep well. Bring it up to a pressure that can push
it through the network of pipes throughout the city or countryside in
order to get it to your faucet and your, your shower head.
So pumping water is one of the largest energy users, in fact it's generally the
largest energy bill that a municipality has is the, paying the electric bill.
To drive the water pumps to pump water around their city.
Appliances they, the, the clothes washers for instance they have to have the
agitator that goes back and forth. All of our appliances be it a blender, be
it a, a Clothes washer, most appliances use some form of work.
So that's another category of work. Slice into the different way than the
transportation, buildings, and manufactering sector.
As we move through the different types of energy that we use in these sectors.
There's quite a bit of energy used in the materials, in manufactering materials.
We're not talking about melting steel of things.
We're talking about manufacturing things that actually need the molecule of the,
of the hydrocarbon that comes in natural gas, coal and oil in particular.
You need that molecule to make plastics. You need it to make chemicals,
all kind, that, that we use in other manufacturing processes.
It's fertilizers, is one we don't think about as being a big energy user.
But fertilizer that allows us to grow a lot more corn on an acre and requires a
lot less man power, because when you fertilize it, it can get twice as much
corn production by tilling the same amount of ground and has allowed a lot of
us to move off the farm, which I grew up on,
and move into an office building somewhere overlooking the city and leave
fewer people back on the farm raising the food that we need for survival.
Fertilizer is a big user of, of energy, just the molecule itself.
We don't burn it, but we actually use the molecule.
Cooling, already mentioned space conditioning,
air conditioning, and refrigeration, they're both cooling.
It's really just to know that, they're two different applications of cooling,
but it takes energy to drive the air conditioner,
it takes energy to drive the refrigerator.
Refrigeration was one of the first users of energy in the civilized society.
Before refrigeration, we had to go to the shop and buy our food everyday,
because if you bought it two or three days in advance, it would be spoiled by
the time we got ready to use it. So you went and bought your food everyday
for it to be eaten that night or the next day at the least.
So, with the advent of refrigeration, that meant that we could go to the store
once a week and, and buy the groceries that we need and put it in the freezer
and put it in the refridgerator and it would be preserved.
Lighting. Lighting is a big end user of electricity
and, and energy. Home and office, of course, and we want,
in order for, to be able to work and read, in the home and office, you need
lights. We have highway lights, security lighting
is, we're adding more and more light in our cities in particular for security
purposes. Fortunately, lighting technologies such
as LEDs are reducing the amount of energy we use to provide the same amount of
light. It's a huge, a huge advancement in the
efficiency of lighting, that's going to help us a lot in reducing
our energy consumption for lighting. The lighting is a significant one,
the end that building heat and building comfort area,
and that we see the users were a little more than a third of our energy in the
U.S. sectors.
In the next module, we'll continue looking at energy in society from the
energy in the economy, how the economy and energy is linked.
Thank you.