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. ,
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
va lue to it. Because it, it can be easily transported
and we also have a situation where we can use it to do a lot of things. , 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. , Bottom. And so that is that is again result of the
second law of thermodynamics. Only about 25 percent 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 ti me.
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.