Trevor Hutchins Dr. Wang
9/11/14 Block-3
Energy and Energy Uses
Harnessing Energy Sources an Overview-
In history people have tried to make energy sources, earlier on the major power source was muscle power. The rich people would hire minimally paid workers and have them harvest the fields and tend to the animals. In the late 1700s inventers had already made many kinds of machinery, but the main invention was the steam engine. The steam engine became the power source for many of the industrial plants. The main source for the engine itself at first was wood, but as that product grew scarce the people realized that they need something new and substituted the wood for coal.
By the end of the 1800s coal became the “King” of fuel because it was the most used fuel source, by the 1920s coal was used 80% of the time when it came to fuel in the U.S.(by 2002 that dropped 22%) But coal had many drawbacks, one being the pollution they gave out and another was the conditions of the workers in the coal mines.
3 new technologies helped in the late 1800s. The internal combustion engine, oil well drilling and the refinement of crude oil. This cleaned up the atmosphere a ton and helped the air on earth as well. The power to weight ratio changed a lot also as the 100 horsepower steam engine weighed much more than the 100 horsepower gasoline engine. Economic development depended largely on the technologies that consumed gasoline. The world today depends on crude oil for 35% of its entire fuel intake.
Natural gas is a much cleaner burning fuels that is also largely used throughout the U.S. It causes much less pollution than coal or wood, but it is harder to extract it from the ground as it will release noxious fumes into the atmosphere if you bring it out of the ground. These 3 kinds of fuels make up 83.5% of u. s. fuel and 79.5 percent of the world.
Electrical Power productions- Electricity is a secondary power source, over 33% of fossil fuels are used to power it because of the vast amount of electric appliances and technologies in the U. S. Electric generators and turbogenerators were created for the purpose of distributing this power
Electric generator- a coil of wire that rotates in a magnetic field or vise versa
Turbogenerators-a sophisticated paddle wheel coupled with a generator
Fluctuations in Demand- Our electricity