Hello, back to Energy 101 and today we're talking about electric power part of the
energy conversion process. and specifically We're looking at,
electric power, which takes heat and chemical.
actually, the chemical energy gets converted to heat.
And we're converting it first to work with a shaft that turns then, a electric
generator. So this is the primary energy conversion
process. We're looking at for electric power
plants. Taking fossil fuel, and, and others, as
we'll see in just a minute. But it's dominated by fossil fuels that
we burn, and produce thermal energy. And convert it to electricity.
That is a very nice form of energy to use and to transport.
And it's, it's incredibly versatile. And it's the percentage of the energy
that we're using that's, being converted to electricity is going up, as we'll see
in a few minutes. we saw this last time.
That we're talking about a power system that takes in.
The thermal energy from the combustion of fuels or the nuclear reaction of Uranium
235. And then goes to boil steam and the, the
we convert some of that energy to electricity.
And we can throw the west, rest of it away.
To the river or to the atmosphere. I've shown it about a third and this is
about what is produced and the split that we have in today's electric power
industry. Which we'll see in just a minute.
This is what we call a spaghetti chart. Don't get intimidated by it.
Let's walk through it and get some nuggets out of this spaghetti diagram.
It's got a lot of information on it. And there's no reason to get intimidated
by it and get confused. Let's look and see what we're talking
about with the electric power industry. first from the big picture we're talking
bout the Raw forms, natural forms of energy over here on the left.
And we're talking about the utilization of those over here on the right.
That by resident-, split up as residential commercial.
Commercial buildings being office buildings and shops.
And, Then the industry which is manufacturing
that produces goods and services and products and then transportation is the
way that it is split up on the right hand side.
So we are focusing today on electric power generation so Let's follow the flow
of what comes in to the electric power conversion process and what leaves the
electric conversion plants that produces the electricity.
So, on the one hand, we see the biggest energy input is caol here.
It's flat. And the black and that is the biggest
piece of the energy input to our electric power generating infrastructure.
And next we move up to the natural gas. Natural gas in the next one and that is
blue. Right here and that is another big chunk.
we see a very little bit of it there, a real sliver by geothermal and which you,
you even see the numbers here. And then wind.
Wind is the other one, right there. Here's the geothermal.
And these percentages you notice are, actually these aren't percentages.
Let's talk about that in just a minute. The overall input is 97.3 quads.
What is a quad? A quad is ten to the fifteent btu so that's a quad.
It makes it convenante because its incessantly a hundred so all of these
numbers like this wind number that is 1.17 quad Quads is essentially the
converts when you divide it by 100 or 97.3 converts to essentially to
percentages. So, the wind energy that number that
should look familiar is the percent of of the electrical energy that we get from
wind. and hydro is the next one up here.
Hydro is a renewable and that's 3, about 3% as we've seen before.
And then, then we have we have solar. Up on, excuse me, nuclear, let's go to
nuclear first. Nuclear you notice, is a big chunk.
And that's, what you build those nuclear plants, they're expensive to build but
cheap to opertate. And you run them a lot.
As we will see later on and the last one on here solar which is a pretty small
fraction denoted by the thin line here that goes in.
So those are all the energy inputs over here on the left hand side into the power
plants. And you can see about what fraction of
the electric power generation is fueled by which energy input.
on the output side, the course the whole purpose here is to generate electricity
and that's shown by the gold line up here.
And you notice that, that you get about we're getting about twelve
12 quads out and electricity. But notice the waste heat out here.
The waste heat that we're throwing away is 26.
Which is about twice. So that's about the same as what we
looked at in the last slide. When we saw that we're throwing away
about two units of energy for every three that we put in converting one to
electricity and that is essentially what happens is for electric power generation
industry as a whole and so we are now equipped to understand what Why we throw
so much of this energy away. It's because it is thermal energy that we
get from burning most of this fuel, the fossil fuel not all of it but even the
nucular is being converted to thermal energy it has a quality of significantly
less than one. Second law of thermaldynamics says that
we can not convert all of it to Electricity, and produ, by.
And not have any waste heat. Second law of thermodynamics dictates
that we degrade some of it. A large fraction of it, in general and
throw it away to the atmosphere. we say throwing it away.
Rejected to the atmosphere, which is the rivers, and the atmospheric.
Air, also. So, this, basically, is, we're in a
situation to interpret what all that means.
Now, once we generate that electricity. Then we see that the, what happens to
that electricity. Excuse me, I've got to turn my cell phone
off here. [NOISE] Okay.
so we where does this, this electricity go? Well it goes to the residential.
It goes down here to commercial. The office buildings and shops.
And it goes to the manufacturing industry.
That's where the electricity goes but before it ever gets there, we're throwing
away 2/3 of the energy that we put into the power plant to produce that
electricity. And electricity is a nice one, as I've
said. A nice form of energy.
And it's one that has a lot of value to it.
Because it it can [SOUND] be easily transported and we also [SOUND] have a
situation where we can use it to do a lot of things.
[SOUND] the other things that we might look at while we're looking at this chart
is petroleum down here. Petroleum, oil.
where does most of it go? We see most of it goes to transportation, and again to
show the example of the second law at work.
You notice that we're putting all of this petroleum oil into the transportation
sector for turning shafts, to rotate our wheels and buses and cars and trucks and
about 80% of that or 75% of that energy is being thrown, thrown away here, over
here on, on the bottom. [SOUND] Bottom.
And so that is that is again result of the second law of thermodynamics.
Only about 25% of it. Gets converted into work that goes to
drive our transportation system that we need.
But, again, the second law of thermodynamics is dictating that we throw
away a lot of that thermal energy that we get out of burning that oil over here.
And converting it to work. Because we're using a.
quality of energy less than one to produce a quality of energy of one.
So, there are a lot of, lot of information on this chart.
And you can look at these numbers. You can look at the small slivers that
make up how very little. You notice the solar energy down here lot
of it goes to industry. And some of it goes into the grid.
we can follow the biomass. Biomass is primarily in burning wood
waste that we have, and even fireplaces. And that goes into industry.
The pulp and paper industry is utilizes a lot of their, their pulp, their waste
that comes out of their pulp and paper industry, and
manufacturing process to produce, steam and to produce electricity to help their
manufacturing process. So it's, looks like a complicated chart.
But it's got a lot of good information once you, get down to looking at the
details. lastly, we'll just look at this chart
quickly. This gives the trend.
And shows for the electric power industry here.
This is the total in-, total power industry over time.
And how much of the electricity is being produced for each sector.
Coal is the black. Petroleum is the red.
Natural gas, blue. The light green is nuclear.
Hydroelectric is a renewable. That, that's dams.
And then we have other renewable other than hydroelectric, because that's
renewable also. the other renewable is mainly wind and
solar. And we see it's up here.
red, and it's a very small sliver. But you can see the trends.
Notice that most of the growth. And the electric power industry, the
fuels you used was coal. Until we got to about 2008 and the
recession. And then the recession meant that people
were using less electricity. And they mainly cut down the elec-, the
coal fired power plants. They have a choice of which ones to run.
So they turned to coal fire power plants down, and kept running the, and
increasing the amount of gas. Notice the amount of gas in the blue has
been trending upward, we're getting more and more from gas.
And that trend is continuing. And, the nuclear has we haven't built any
nuclear plants in since in a long time, since basically the 80s.
But we're, we're able to run em more than we used to because they, they're getting
more reliable. And then you get the hydro, which is, you
take the hydro if you can get it because this.
Once you build a dam it's free energy, doesn't cost anything for the energy
it's, the water's there. So, this shows you the trend of all of
these fuels that we're using for the electric power industry.
So that gives us a, a quick overview of the electric power industry and where the
fuel is coming from and how much of the energy we're throwing away to the
atmosphere as a result of the second law of thermodynamics.
So that concludes that section and we'll look a little more at the electric power
industry from time to time. Thank you.