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.