Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-hgkh8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T00:31:25.130Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - How Energy Is Produced

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2015

Gian Andrea Pagnoni
Affiliation:
Istituto Delta di Ecologia Applicata, Italy
Stephen Roche
Affiliation:
UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, Hamburg
Get access

Summary

Turning Heat into Power: The Fundamentals of Energy Generation

Apart from gravity, heat is the form of energy with which we are most familiar. As warm-blooded animals, we convert a significant part of the chemical energy in our food into heat. About half a million years ago, we also learned to generate heat from external sources by burning biomass. Since then, we have greatly expanded the range of fuels we burn to produce heat, but we still rely in most cases on combustion (the exception in our modern energy system is nuclear power, where heat is generated by exploiting a chain reaction of uranium atoms). However, while we still rely largely on combustion to generate heat, we have learned to turn heat into a far more portable and flexible form of energy – electricity.

Most ancient civilizations developed along waterways: the Mesopotamian along the Tigris and Euphrates, the Egyptian along the Nile, the Chinese along the Yellow River, the Indian along the Indus, the Roman along the Tiber. Water is essential to human life, for agriculture, fishing, and as a transportation medium. It is also valuable for washing (clothes, food, and bodies) and for industry. In the last 150 years, another inducement has been added to the list: water is an essential resource for generating electricity.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×