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Solar energy presentation (1)
- 3. What is electricity? How is electricity generated?
- 4. What percentage of US Energy use is supplied by Solar energy? 1) Make an educated guess 2) Compare with the estimates at your table 3) Agree on an amount for your table
- 6. Write one quadrillion What is a BTU? How much fuel does it take to produce one quadrillion BTU’s?
Editor's Notes
- Electricity is a form of energy. Electricity is the flow of electrons. All matter is made up of atoms, and an atom has a center, called a nucleus. The nucleus contains positively charged particles called protons and uncharged particles called neutrons. The nucleus of an atom is surrounded by negatively charged particles called electrons. The negative charge of an electron is equal to the positive charge of a proton, and the number of electrons in an atom is usually equal to the number of protons. When the balancing force between protons and electrons is upset by an outside force, an atom may gain or lose an electron. When electrons are "lost" from an atom, the free movement of these electrons constitutes an electric current.
- What is 2% of 9% of 95 quadrillion BTU’s (1.71*10^14)
- 1,000,000,000,000,000 British Thermal Unit BTU stands for British Thermal Unit, a measure of energy. One BTU is not much: it's equal to 0.25 food calories or about the amount of energy in the tip of a match. To put this in perspective, the food energy in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is about 1250 BTU, one kwh of electricity is equivalent to 3,412 BTU, a gallon of gasoline contains about 125,000 BTU, and one short ton of coal (2000 lbs) contains about 20 million BTU. Because a single BTU is so small, energy is usually measured in thousands or millions of BTU. For entire economies, energy is measured in quadrillion BTU, or "quads" for short. A quadrillion is equal to 10^15. In 2002, total US energy consumption was 97.4 quads. The metric equivalent of the BTU is the Joule. One quad equals approximately 1.055 Exajoules (10^18 Joules). It's about equal to the amount of energy in 45 million tons of coal, or 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or 170 million barrels of crude oil. In 1988, total world energy consumption was about 1 quad every 26 hours.To make this a bit less abstract, 45 million tons of coal would be a pile 10 feet thick, one mile wide and about 3.3 miles long. At 60 mph, it would take about 9 minutes to drive around the pile. In terms of electricity, the energy content of 1 quad is equal to about 293 terawatt-hours or 33 gigawatt-years. However, a typical steam-turbine power plant burning fossil fuels is only able to capture about a third of the energy in the fuel, so 1 quad of fuel actually produces about 11 gigwatt-years of electricity.