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It
is a fundemental understanding, in our physics,
that energy cannot be created or
destroyed,
just converted from one form into another.
Example: the potential energy of water behind a
dam is converted to kenetic energy through pipes
and to mechanical energy in a turbine and
finally to electrical energy when the turbine
drives a generator.
A
second
understanding, in our physics, is of
entropy,
which is generally described as 'increasing
disorder'. A way to describe this is to set a
brick house up in the wilderness, coming back in
a thousand years you'd quite reasonably expect
to find a pile of bricks; this is known as
'positive entropy'. On the other hand, if we set
out a pile of bricks we would not expect to find
a brick house in a thousand years. If a pile of
bricks turned into a brick house it would be
'negative entropy' or increasing
order.
In
energy conversion, these two understandings
combine to
describe high and low level energy. High level
energy, (like electricity) is like a brick
house, hard to aquire. High level energy easily
and efficently converts into low level energy
(like heat) which is like a pile of bricks. We
can make close to 100% heat with 100%
electricity. It is hard
to
turn heat into electricity; we throw away up to
99% of our heat energy to get 1% electricity.
The very
best thermodynamic cycles I know, still throw
away 40% of the heat energy to make
electricity.
Electricity is
the premium energy in our civilization. We
convert many other forms of energy to
electricity. At Eagle-Research we experiment
with converting natural, environmental energies
to electricity. We look for forms of energy that
will not cause our fragile environment to
degrade. Examples are all over this website,
like electromagnetic energy, eco-fuels and
gravity.
Burning
oil and coal are extremely bad for the
environment as
we know it. Nuclear energy not only costs more
energy to produce than you get out of it, but
you are left with a deadly residue that stays
deadly for 100 thousand years or more (that's
what the half life propaganda really
means).
So
called 'clean' hydro energy is nice except for
three things:
1
We flood our best agricultural land (river
bottom).
2
There are
not that many places that it can be used.
3
Most of the dams have only decades life span,
because the reservoirs fill up with
silt.
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