As societies grew, so did the need for fuel sources with a higher energy output. The need for the higher energy output lead to the invention and dominance of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels like coal, the first fossil fuel source truly harvested were burned by people to generate kinetic energy. A main form of the produced kinetic energy was electricity. The electricity was formed by burning coal to produce high temperatures to boil water in a steam engine. The steam would spin a turbine, transforming potential energy into transmission capable and usable kinetic energy. Then, as the search for more efficient energy continued, the steam turbine was invented. Fossil fuels could be used in a smaller engine and produce even more kinetic energy in the form of electricity. With more effective engines, like the steam turbine and later the combustion engine, more fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and more coal were used more to create greater amounts of electricity. More electricity, combined with the better ways to burn fossil fuels lead to lights and more efficient ways to shape and use metals from the ground. The higher quality metals allowed for more technological advanced that opened the doorway for fission and fusion energy, or nuclear energy. The high energy output from nuclear energy was aimed to help reduce the use of fossil fuels, but health problems have helped to hold back nuclear dominance as an energy source.
Answers:
The other energy sources are in the fossil fuel society chapter because some were created to better harvest the potential energy fossil fuels, like the hydro steam engines and turbines, and some were created to ease the reliance of fossil fuels during the search for even greater energy sources in the twentieth century.
The thermal efficiency tends to dramatically increase over time as new energy sources or technology can produce higher and higher temperatures from burning fossil fuels or using nuclear fission.
Questions:
1-Breifly nuclear fusion was mentioned but not described in any detail. What would the energy ratio or thermal production of fusion energy compared to fission energy?
2-Were combustion engines ever used to provide electrical energy to housing like steam turbines were, or were combustion engines utilized only for smaller vehicle transportation.3-Why was there such a higher efficiency of AC electrical power over DC electricity?
1. It's hard to know what the thermal efficiency of fusion would be, since we still don't have a practical way to have a controlled fusion reaction, the way we have a controlled fission reaction to provide electricity or to power a ship or sub.
ReplyDeleteInternal combustion engines (the basic type found in a car/bus/truck) are used all the time to produce electricity as back-up generators. A diesel-electric locomotive is basically a big internal combustion engine that powers an electric generator, and the electricity produced is fed to an electric motor that actually drives the train. This is worth doing for a huge thing like a locomotive because the electric motor delivers power to the wheels in a more desirable way than does the diesel motor if it were hooked up directly.
Before 1973 there was a significant amount of oil-fired electric capacity in the national electric grid, but those were thermal-electric plants (where water is turned to steam and the steam drives a turbine), just like a coal plant only with a different fuel. After 1973 oil was too expensive to be used for that purpose when coal could do the job just as well, keeping oil for transportation and home-heating uses where coal was impractical or significantly less desirable.