Saving Energy, the Environment, and Money

by W.A. Steer PhD
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We are increasingly bombarded by all kinds of "environmental" and "energy-saving" messages; some confusing, some genuine, some alarmist, some misguided, some with a hidden agenda. How can we make sense of them? Importantly, how can we concentrate our limited time and effort on making the biggest difference? In most cases, reducing your energy consumption should personally save you money, too. On this page I'm hoping to explain energy (and carbon-dioxide) basics, offer some calculations and show how headline-grabbing comparisons are arrived-at, and give you an intuitive feel for energy-issues.

Introduction: Energy demand and usage

Reducing our "environmental footprint", or national CO₂ emissions is not just about a move away from fossil fuels and towards so-called renewable (or nuclear) energy sources. Managing and reducing demand also has a vital role to play. Particularly with the rising energy costs, saving energy makes good financial sense too. But we're so used to just flicking a switch, lighting the oven, turning on the central heating, or starting a car that it's often difficult to visualise how much energy we're using, and where. This page is here to make energy "real", based on sound fundamental science.

Quantifying energy

Electricity

Domestic electricty consumption is measured and billed in kilowatt-hours (kWh).

The rate at which any appliance uses energy (i.e. its power) is measured in watts (W), or kilowatts (kW). 1kW = 1000W.
To calculate the total amount of energy used by an applicance over a given time, multiply its power by the number of hours of use.

For example, a 3kW electric heater operated for 1 hour uses 3kWh of electricity. The same amount of energy, 3kWh, would be used by running five 60W light bulbs (5×60W = 300W) for 10 hours. An electric shower, typically rated at 9kW, would consume 3kWh of energy in a mere 20 minutes!

Note that the label on an appliance always states its maximum power. Basic appliances such as lamps, kettles, and toasters will draw the full power the whole time they are in use, while things like heaters and fridges may be thermostatically controlled and switch off and on intermittently. Many electronic products such as televisions and computers will vary the amount of power they take depending on how bright the picture or how hard they're working.

Gas

Domestic gas consumption is measured in cubic metres (or cubic feet) and billed in kilowatt-hours (kWh). For British gas, 1 cubic metre is approximately equivalent to 11kWh (The exact conversion should be explained in the small print on the back of your bill).

Petroleum

Petrol (for cars) is sold by the litre. The "calorific value" (energy content) of petrol is around 60kWh per gallon (13kWh per litre).

UK retail prices for energy

British consumer energy prices (as at August 2006) including taxes:

Gas is charged at 3 or 4 pence per kilowatt-hour
Electricity costs between 10 and 14 pence per kilowatt-hour

For the same amount of energy, electricity is four times the price of gas! This price differential is largely justified by the poor efficiency (around 30%) of generating electricity from the burning of gas or coal.

One litre of petrol retails for around 99 pence, making petrol work out at around 7.5 pence per kWh.

Power-hungry?

In the UK and Europe, the biggest fraction of our total energy consumption is used for heating and transport.
[No-one would argue this, but would be good to quote some reputable figures, even so.]

Examples

The amount of energy required to boil the water for one cup of tea (250ml) is about 90kJ. [3600kJ = 1kWh]

This amount of energy could alternatively:

Run an electrically-heated shower for about 10 seconds
Run a conventional 60W light bulb (or any 60W appliance) for 25 minutes
Run a low-energy 12W lamp (light allegedly equivalent to a 60W conventional bulb) for 2 hours
Power a personal MP3 player all day every day for around two weeks
Power a mobile phone for around one month of typical use
Refine the aluminium to make one tenth of a drinks can
Accelerate a 1500kg mass (eg car) from stationary to 25mph (40km/h), once
This is also roughly the total power stored in a brand new alkaline (eg Duracell) 'D' battery

Scratch

Understanding energy usage and reducing demand have an important role to play in meeting our environmental obligations. Energy consumption and efficiency is very well understood by scientists and engineers. In a laboratory setting it is quite straightforward to measure, calculate, or simulate the power requirements of almost any machine or activity. In contrast, considering an existing house, office premises, or lifestyle, it is often not obvious where the energy goes, and how best to make savings. The primary purpose of this web-page is to offer practical guidance in understanding energy use.

Energy and Power

There is a key distinction: power is the rate of use of energy. ["use" should really read "conversion" since strictly energy is neither created nor destroyed!] Power is effectively the "flow rate" of energy. Energy is measured in Joules (J), kiloJoules (kJ), megaJoules (MJ) etc and kilowatt-hours (kWh)
1kWh=3600kJ (3600 because that's how many seconds there are in an hour) Power is measured in Joules-per-second, more commonly known as watts (W).

Energy cannot be created or destroyed

You just convert it from one form to another.

Classes of energy

Potential (stored) energy - energy by virtue of height (against gravity), chemical energy (batteries, fuels etc), energy stored in a stretched or compressed spring... Kinetic energy - energy of movement ... ... Heat

Energy in different forms can easily be compared.

Energy conversions are almost always inefficient; if any process is less than 100% efficient, it's pretty certain something is getting hot (or at least warm) somewhere! Light bulbs get hot, fluorescent tubes get warm, electric motors get warm, car engines get very hot, most electronic equipment (televisions, DVD players, set-top-boxes, computers, mobile phones...) gets warm in use. Rub yours hands together - in any mechanical system friction makes things warm.

A couple of myths

It takes as much (if not more) energy to re-heat a cold house than it would have done to keep it warm by leaving the heating on all day long. MYTH
Myth 2
Myth 3 ?

These are very common misconceptions which are still spread by many people who should know better!

We'll come back to why these ideas are wrong later.

A couple of core facts

Space-heating and transport account for around 80% of an individual's energy consumption. (These have greatest scope for savings)
Myth 2
Myth 3 ?

Energy basics

Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be converted from one form to another.

The efficiency of any process or applicance is the ratio of the useful (or wanted) energy or work obtained to the amount of energy put in in the first place. If, for example, a light bulb is "only 30% efficient", the other 70% of the power we put in doesn't disappear, rather it is manifest as heat. Whether it's friction in a mechanical system, warmth from a computer or television, or a car engine, "lost" energy almost universally appears as heat.

It's generally very easy (and efficient) to convert any form of energy into heat, but much more difficult (and inefficient) to do the reverse.

"Super efficient" halogen (or whatever) heaters advertised in the Sunday papers or mail-order catologues are a mockery: every electric heater ever made is 100% efficient at converting electricity to heat!

The rate of heat loss (energy loss) from a premises due to conduction through the walls and windows etc is proportional to the difference between the inside and outside temperature. Far better to be tucked up under a thick duvet at 5am than have the central heating working hard to keep the whole house at 21 Celcius while the outdoor temperature is at its coldest!

Miscellaneous things

Drying clothes and towels

Covering radiators with clothes or towels (eg to dry them) greatly reduces the effectiveness of the radiator for warming the room, and is likely to upset the balence of heating in the house. If, as a consequence, you turn up the thermostat you are likely to excessively-heat the rest of the house and waste a significant amount of energy. If you must dry things on the radiator, use a rack which hangs the clothes in front of the radiator.

To dry more than a small amount of washing (and to avoid condensation and damp problems), you need a change of air as well as heat. For the months when your house is heated, it is normally going to be more energy-efficient, and healthier to dry your washing outside or in a (unheated/minimally heated) conservatory where there is a good airflow.

Overview of Energy sources

These are some necessarily brief notes to set the scene; please follow up references for more detail if required. At this point I'm trying to flag key concerns, rather than go into detail of arguments.

Combustion and Carbon-Dioxide

Most fuels we might burn (wood, coal, gas, petrol, kerosene...) are hydrocarbons; that is they are composed principally of carbon and hydrogen. When they are burned the combustion products are mainly carbon-dioxide (CO₂) and di-hydrogen monoxide (H₂O - ie water vapour). The oxidation of carbon to CO₂ and hydrogen to H₂O is exothermic; it releases energy - usually as heat. Wood-burning releases CO₂ which was previously captured from the atmosphere by the tree as it grew (probably in the past 50 years), so is potentially part of a cycle which happens within a human lifetime. Our present burning of coal and oil reserves, which formed many millions of years ago, rapidly releases CO₂ which would otherwise have been locked away. Whether such fossil fuel deposits will last another 30 years, 50 years, or 100 years is really neither here nor there - we're using them up thousands of times faster than they took to form, so they will run out; greenhouse effects aside, this fuel source is not sustainable in the long-term.

Hydrogen

Hydrogen is not the solution to any energy crisis; hydrogen is merely a (relatively) convenient energy store.

H₂O + energy -> hydrogen gas + oxygen gas

hydrogen + oxygen -> H₂O + energy

To store an appreciable amount of energy requires quite a lot of hydrogen, so it has to be compressed (using more energy) and transported or stored in heavy pressure-vessels or cylinders. It's also dangerous as it burns very rapidly or even explodes when mixed with air.

Electric cars

Electric cars may make for cleaner cities, but though there may be some efficiency savings, they mainly just shift the combustion and pollution to the power station.

Nuclear power

Since there's no combustion involved, the nuclear reactor generates power without releasing CO₂. Mining and enriching the uranium requires a significant input of (typically fossil-sourced) energy, so it not completely carbon-neutral. As uranium resources become more scarce, the energy required in uranium-enrichment becomes progressively more prohibitive. Some types of reactors (breeder reactors) may create enough future-fuel to be more sustainable? Nuclear power still has plenty of unresolved issues of what to do with the waste, problems of nuclear proliferation, and security/safety.

"Renewable" sources - wind, wave, solar etc.

These are important, but with the best will in the world could not realistically meet our present vast demand for energy on their own. In general the energy density of these natural sources is quite low, meaning that the capture device (turbines, solar panels etc) need to be spread out across a large area of land. With solar there are issues of storage, since we usually require most energy for heating during the winter, and not in the summer when the sun is strongest! Photovoltaic (PV) cells convert sunlight directly into electricity but are only around 20% efficient, they're also very expensive to make (although even less efficient but much cheaper technologies may be on the horizon). In many cases the much lower-tech solar water heaters are more practical.

Created: March 2006
Last modified: 21 May 2006
Source: http://www.techmind.org/energy/