Efficient Energy Use

1509 Words7 Pages
1. Efficient energy use, sometimes simply called energy efficiency, is the goal to reduce the amount of energy required to provide products and services. 2. Energy simply defined is “the ability to do work.” Heating a home, dribbling a basket ball or digging a hole all takes energy. The sources of that energy and the ways that energy is converted are extremely varied. You need to take an energy source and convert it so work can be done. 3. The industrial revolution occurred as a result of the discovery of the amount of energy in coal. The amounts of energy released when coal is burned gave inventors the ability to operate larger and more productive steam engines. Previously, wood was used and did not have enough energy released to power steam engines and other machines. Once the energy in coal began being used, it changed the course of history. This was the first time in history that people stopped paying attention to the cycles of the Earth and instead they began working against them. Before the industrial revolution, they had to grow crops when weather was good and store enough food and fuel sources to last through the winters. This was a dramatic shift in the way the resources on our planet were utilized; it was a switch from renewable to nonrenewable resource utilization, a switch from organic to inorganic economy, and a switch from resource use to resource depletion economy. The discovery of the process to refine oil into usable sources of energy fueled the transportation revolution, another explosion in the use of nonrenewable energy sources. The increased use of oil further changed the landscape from using natural sources of energy to working against the processes of the Earth. 4. The materials economy: extraction, manufacturing, distribution, consumption, disposal. Our economy is based on a system of using things and then throwing them
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