There are far to many people out there who simply have no idea what energy is. I would like to say it is not their fault, but it is. It behooves all of us to know how our lives work. You do not have a life without energy.
A young pregnant mother carries a baby to term consuming a lot of energy. She has cravings for particular foods, they seem strange to us men. Pickles, Ice cream, a Big Mac. Why? Stored Energy. The Minerals in those things, carry needed sustenance for the baby. That sustenance is energy or the biological/mechanical means to transfer it.
Our lives could not be if our bodies could not turn food into energy. The ability to do work. That is in a nut shell the definition of Energy.
There are many engineering measurements of energy, a few examples are: calories, joules, watts, kilowatts, and more. These measurements are used solely for the purpose of making the math easier. It is all the same thing only measured in increments that the mind can fathom. For example the amount of energy needed to make a pot of coffee is around 900 watts for 10 minutes. If you want a comparison that is apples to oranges different, that means you need to eat 2,116,000 calories worth of food to generate the heat used to boil the water and strain it through your grounds to get the desired 12 cups of coffee.
There is a physical comparison in energy for every exchange. Most likely the one most people are familiar with is the electric bill or the gas bill when they fill up their car. This is how energy is monetized. Food, Electricity, Gasoline, all cost money. Why?
Comfort, ease, quality of life, technology, advances in science. None of these things exist without energy.
How do we capture and use energy? We humans throughout history have devised, invented, engineered many ways to make use of energy, but the one discovery that pushed us into the industrial age was thermodynamics. Shortly after that was hydrocarbons. They came about truthfully useful at almost the same time. We knew we could harness the wind to do work, hence the windmill on every farm for pumping water and the famous Dutch windmills for processing grain, and the waterwheel mills used for mechanical energy for grinding grains or processing early metals. Then we used an old and earlier discovery that took chemically stored energy, transferred it to heat, (combustion chemistry) and that heat to water, (steam) to mechanical energy and the world boomed. Steam ships, power plants, and drove our quality of life to where we are now.
So with the minds of very smart people these things were taken to the generation of steam, to electricity and to the life we have now, and a life that many people in other parts of the world cannot even dream of having. Now we are criticizing them for wanting our life. It is said that hand washing, running water and modern plumping (1940ish) has increased life expectancy more than any other contribution to society. That could not have happened without electricity transferring energy. Pump motors need electricity.
We have reached a peak in energy transformation, we now have trillions of btu’s of energy available to us, none of which is going to run out anytime soon, and we have decided to regress from its use in the name of a sensational and cultish agenda by people who have NO idea what energy even is. They have decided that killing whales is acceptable, when not 20 years ago whales were the environmental care of the day. They, these, people who claim to care about the climate are brain washing those that do not understand energy and what it has done for us. One pound of coal saves more life then one can fathom.
Richard,
Thank you for doing this. I plan to write a similar "Primer" on energy. I have tried in the past but do not believe I have reached the average person. A common friend of our's sent me a note to tell me, "I confuse people by stating that they need about 315 million BTUs each year per person, which is arrived at by dividing the total Primary energy used in America about 100 Quadrillion BTUs by the population...= about 315 million BTUs per person per year. Or about 850,000 BTUs per day per person +/- 15,000 BTU's.....It is a challenge. Thank you for your stab at "Demystifying Energy". Stay well my friend, and keep up your important work, Dick
How true!