Is there any kind of energy that doesn’t require other energy to produce?
I don’t really understand that much about how energy is produced in anything more than a very simplistic way, so I rely upon others who know much more than I do to explain things to me.
What I currently understand, I believe, is that every type of potentially useful energy that we know of still requires the consumption (and associated negatives) of some older, less desirable or limited energy technology to produce or use. Is this correct or not?
I can’t recall right now what, if any energy technology is required to start using solar technology, perhaps the downside to solar is the dependence on weather…
But I do feel confident that I’ve never heard of anything that can, out-of-the-box, replace our consumption of natural gas and petroleum and coal and nuclear without, at some stage, using natural gas or petroleum or coal or nuclear…
In a sense, all energy except for nuclear is just “deferred solar”. It’s just a question of how long it has been deferred. The energy in coal was made from solar energy millions of years ago. The energy in hydroelectricity was made from solar a few years ago. The energy in wind power was made from solar a few days ago.
The problem with fossil fuels is not the ultimate origin of the energy, it’s just that we are drawing down the intermediate product at a rate much larger than it is being re-created.
A civilization builds up gradually from eating the food that powers our bodies to making fire to [steps omitted] drilling for oil to [steps omitted] constructing a nuclear power station. Constructing new technology intially utilizes the power resources of the prior technology. But once constructed, obviously any useful power resource generates more power than it consumes. In some cases, the prior technology and/or power resource can be retired completely.
In a very simplistic sense, solar insolation/warming needs no energy–go lie in the sun and get warm. For it to heat your house you need to build a house (ideally with passive solar in mind), so not zero energy, but building the house is not for the express purpose of using solar energy–it’s for shelter.
There’s setup costs. Solar energy, hydroelectric or wind energy, for example, is free for the taking (but is a side effect of solar output.) However, there is the manufacturing cost to create the equipment to capture this energy - solar panels need to be grown/deposited from certain chemicals which need to be mined, plus the metal conductors and braces, etc. For dams, you need to build them, plus machine and install the dynamos, control gates, etc. Wind turbines are machined steel, fiberglass etc. If you use electricity, you need the wiring to distribute the power.
OTOH, things that burn stuff are simply converting one form of energy to another, but produce different byproducts. Wind or water power simply results in slightly less energetic air or water. Burning things, creates CO2 and possibly other results.
Perhaps this is the distinction you seek. If you are burning something, (or letting it decay radioactively to less energetic elements) you must continuously collect and use up new supplies of that fuel for each day that the power plant makes energy, with all the energy consumption that collecting process implies - mining, drilling, pumping. For solar, wind, water power - once you’ve built the infrastructure, you are not making energy to produce energy - the sun is doing that. There is no significant human effort to get the energy.
But if you want to expend NO energy at all - the only process that takes advantage of that is when you lie there in the sun working on your tan.
At the microscopic level, when you have a “something” that has potential energy that you wish to access, you need to activate the process of going from a high potential energy to a lower one. That activation will always require energy that can’t be initially obtained from the “something”. For example, a match to start a fire, a spark to start an explosion, a push start downhill motion, a current to start an engine, etc.
If the “something” doesn’t require outside energy to start the release, it would’ve already started by itself. That’s obviously bad from a practicality standpoint, but it also means that the store of potential energy would have already been released.
But on a larger scale, it becomes a bootstrapping problem. Sure, to build your first solar panel, you have to expend some other kind of energy - fossil fuels, hydroelectric, whatever. But at some point, you’ll have enough solar panels to adequately support the production of new solar panels. At that point, the output of the solar panels will continue to increase without the use of the other sources, and gradually more power will be used to replace the use of the other energy sources in general.
To answer the OP, energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another. This is known as the principle of conservation of energy and applies to any closed system (a system where energy is not allowed to enter or exit). There is a similar principle of conservation of mass in which matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Of course, Einstein kind of messed up classical physics with his E=mC^2 equation, but even that only allows energy to be created by destroying mass (and vice versa).
So, no, any energy man wants to use must either already exist in some form, or must be produced by annihilation of matter (nuclear reactions), which is really the same if, as Einstein theorized, energy and matter are simply different manifestations of the thing.
My high school chemistry teacher was fond of saying, “The universe is constantly trying to achieve maximum entropy and minimum enthalpy.” Entropy being what she liked to call “mixed up-ed-ness” or “state of dis-order” and enthalpy being a system’s internal energy state.
So…what about the (insane!) amount of energy needed for mobility? Is it anywhere near happening in the next 100 years that shipping, trucking, flying, trains and heavy mobile machinery could be converted to electric, and could be fed that electricity in sufficient quantity and at a sufficient pace a non-polluting, sustainable manner?
I think a great example of what the OP is trying to get at is this: we can’t possibly fix a shortage of available electrical power this year by creating more solar cells, because the energy it takes to manufacture a solar cell is about equal to what the solar cell itself can create over three years. Solar cells may be great because of all the energy you get back over and above that amount, but it does mean you have to put serious energy into producing them.
And this quote is a great counterexample. I guess you could argue going to lie in the sun takes a little energy, so we’ll say suppose you’re just laying there feeling chilly, and eventually the sunbeam through the window makes its way to where you are, and now you get energy without expending any. In fact you’d have to spend a little energy NOT to.
Perhaps there’s a spectrum of low energy investment to high energy investment that is useful to contemplate. Gathering fallen wood for the fire is quite low energy investment. All the research going into fusion is quite high energy investment.
No. We either cut down heavily on mobility (and all other sectors) or the rich watch from their air-conditioned mansions and electric cars as the poor die in famines and natural disasters, tut-tutting that they can only blame themselves and their continued use of fossil fuels.
There are people right now causing an absolute fuck-ton of CO2 emissions to fly to another hemisphere, go on a cruise ship and look at emperor penguins (a species that will be gone in a century or two), whose grandchildren or great-grandchildren will experience massive global disasters.
Climate change is not caused by “the rich” doing their thing. There’s not enough rich people for it to matter. It’s primarily caused by all the people who live in first and second world countries, either directly or indirectly. Most of it has to do with manufacturing and transportation.
This brings up one suggestion, that local on-demand manufacturing could replace bulk industry. Robotics, 3D printing, and similar tech could create local mini-factories or home units where much of what we need to ship in bulk would be replaced by the shipping of general raw materials. Instead of tons of odd plastic bits being shipped and stocked from halfway around the world, you could order up any specific plastic piece you need from the local printer, much as how the internet has significantly reduced the distribution of printed paper. Distribution would be less of bulky finished products, more about a few basic parts and raw materials. There is also tech for 3D printing metal parts. Imagine many of your small appliances designed around a standard range of electric motors, batteries, etc. whether food processor, leaf blower, or power drill. COVID has already demonstrated the problems with overly-extended supply chains and too centralized a manufacturing industry. One baby formula or chicken processing plant should not affect the supply of a whole continent.
Instead of an Ikea full of products shipped halfway around the world, there would be a robotic facility that can take sheets of wood and cut and finish the necessary pieces for precisely the size and shape of furniture you order (or design). And another robot that picks precisely the hardware required to complete the job.
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