Friday 22 May 2009

Friday energy tip...let's start!

Well, our life depends on energy. Today is the day #1 of my new scheduled posts, and i'll talk about it, energy. To introduce all the tips that i'll give you in the next week, i want to explain you in a easy way something about energy.

Energy is everywhere. Without energy we cant breath, walk, chat, cook, work, we wouldn't have the day light, winds, rain. Without energy there wouldn't be life.
All the energy we have came from the sun (e.g. petroleum is being formed by old forests, and the forests have grown with the solar energy), or from nuclear reactions (uranium and his friends).
But, what's energy?
The only thing that i can say is that energy can be transformed: think about a river and a mill...the river flows, the mill's round is pushed by the water and it spins. From a river of water we have a driving force.

The only problem is that: Mother Nature is perfect, our machineries not, so we always lose some energy during the transformation. We measure this lost of energy with a coefficient of performance: to calculate it, we divide the energy transformed with the energy before its transformation, and this division is always smaller than 1.
Our times technology is a lot better than the first, but our steam machineries have a performance of about 0,5 ... half of the energy we give through petroleum or coal or gas is lost. We can watch this problem from another point of view: the electic energy we use to have the pc on needs a double quantity of coal to be produced.

You can ask...lost where? Sometimes the principal actor of this lost is friction, that turns energy into heat, but in the case of transforming the chemical energy of coal into electricity we have lots and lot of problems, from the problem of materials that don't resist to the heat, to the chemistry problem during the combustion. Lots.

Ok, all this oration for what?

I wanted to explain you that the energy that we use for habit came from something, and during its transformation into that shape that we love to use (electricity), we lose the half of it. Think about every waste of energy like you've wasted a double quantity of it, and a double quantity of pollutants. Is that sad, isn't it?

In the next weeks i'll guide you through a saving energy process in our everyday life. Stay tuned.

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