# What does wasted electrical energy get turned into? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 3, 2006, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wasted-electrical-energy-get-turned-into/382695 "2006-12-03T16:09:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![flex727](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/258eb7/32.png) [@flex727](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flex727)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2006, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wasted-electrical-energy-get-turned-into/382695/21 "2006-12-05T01:56:04Z")
[QUOTE=Chronos] Some sound, too, if it’s spinning fans or drives. But really, everything else pales in comparison to the heat. [/QUOTE] And, of course, all sound turns into heat as well. ---
**Author:** ![snailboy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/97f17d/32.png) [@snailboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snailboy)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2006, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wasted-electrical-energy-get-turned-into/382695/22 "2006-12-05T02:17:18Z")
[QUOTE=mks57] The electronics can also produce sound. For example, the horizontal sweep circuit in a television set. Power supplies and DC-DC convertors are also common sources of sound energy. [/QUOTE] Good point. Even high-voltage power lines make a buzzing sound. > [@scr4](#): > > And high-voltage electronics can create ozone. But I don’t think computers can. That’s an interesting one right there, electrical energy becoming chemical energy. I’d count that. (By the way, I only mentioned computers to demonstrate some examples. My question is about pretty much anything with electricity flowing through it.) > [@ambushed](#): > > Just in the unlikely case you were wondering about this aspect, there’s a sense in which the electricity that isn’t used by your equipment and is not lost to radiation/heat and entropy goes right back out your wall socket back into the grid to complete the circuit. > > Might that be what you’re wondering? Not really no. I was wondering what happens to the electricity that flows through electronic components that aren’t designed for the purpose of emitting some other type of energy, such as LED’s and speakers. I kind of got to thinking about it because I wondered how much electricity a device without any energy output components, such as a calculator minus the display, would use. I knew some of it would become heat, but wasn’t sure about any other forms of energy. ---
**Author:** ![Napier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ce73a5/32.png) [@Napier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Napier)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2006, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wasted-electrical-energy-get-turned-into/382695/23 "2006-12-05T04:25:34Z")
\>A computer outputs information, and information carries no energy If I followed some articles a few years ago, this isn’t true - information and energy and matter are three faces of the same coin. I think a kilogram contains about 10^65 bits. This is not the different and real issue of requiring energy to transmit information, or to store it, but rather the subtle discovery that mass is fundamentally composed of information - a major outcome of the physics of the 1908s, I think. An article entitled “The Holographic Universe” explained some of this in Scientific American several years ago, IIRC. They described that the limit to the amount of information that could fit into a sphere was the area of the sphere in Planck areas times some constant like 4/3 or something - this was in bits. This very large volume of information would be sufficiently massive to warp the space inside the sphere, which is why the amount that could fit inside was not proportional to the volume (in a Cartesian or nonEinsteinian sense). ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2006, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wasted-electrical-energy-get-turned-into/382695/24 "2006-12-05T05:28:20Z")
[QUOTE=Napier] If I followed some articles a few years ago, this isn’t true - [/QUOTE] Yes, I know I was wrong, I’ve been corrected already. Do I have to specifically admit it before we can move on? But even then, one could argue that a computer’s job is not to manufacturer information, so calculating its efficiency in joules per byte is not very useful. And in theory, what exactly is the minimum energy needed to carry one bit of information? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wasted-electrical-energy-get-turned-into/382695.md?page=1)