Energy Conversion

In this lesson, we're going to discuss energy conserva6on and we're going to look at this
specifically, in the context of a residen6al se<ng. It's important to make the dis6nc6on
between the law of conserva6on of energy and energy conserva6on, so here we're going to
talk about energy conserva6on. The law of conserva6on of energy is a fundamental law of
physics, we talked about this in lesson two and it states that the total energy of an isolated
system is constant. So this is s6ll true, this is always true it's a fundamental law of physics.
It's just not what we're focusing on here. What we're focusing on here is the idea of energy
conserva6on. This is will incorporate the idea of efficiency and intelligent ways in which we
can use our energy, and like I men6oned, we're going to look at this in a residen6al se<ng.
So, essen6ally, in your home, how this can apply. We've already discussed the idea of
efficiency when we talked about heat engines. So, this is an important concept when we're
considering energy conserva6on. In many contexts, we can think of the idea of efficiency as
the frac6on of energy that's used, that is transformed into useful energy we want. So, we
use energy for some task: if I have 100 joules of energy used, if 70 joules of that energy goes
into what I want and 30% is wasted in some other way, then that efficiency would be 70%.
It's the frac6on of the energy that used in a useful way, the way I wanted to use this energy.
Let's look at an example like how efficient is a conven6onal light bulb. So, a conven6onal
light bulb, a 60-waN light bulb, uses 60 waNs of power, that's 60 joules per second of energy
is used by this light bulb. However, the light bulb I'm using to illuminate a room, and about
three waNs of power is that light, the visible light that I want out of this light bulb, and the
other 57 waNs are infrared light that I can't see, and heat, and so I can think of this as it is 60
WaNs, is the power consumed, or the power, the amount of energy per second used, and I
get three waNs, that's the amount of energy per second that is useful to me, it's the visible
light that I want. So, if I look at useful energy, divided by the total amount of energy, I get
three waNs over 60 WaNs, and I get 5%. So, a conven6onal light bulb is about 5% efficient.
Let's look at the difference between saving, or conserving energy, versus producing energy.
I'm going to look at a comparison between reducing your energy used by some amount, or
finding more resources for the same amount of energy. So, imagine someone from Alberta,
shown here, I apologize to anyone from Alberta for this stereotypical picture of a person
from Alberta, so let's say this person reduces his electricity use by three kilowaN hours. So,
this is about the amount of energy in one pound of coal. Let's compare that to the idea of he
just goes out and finds a pound of coal that wouldn't be found otherwise, and we'll compare
these two things because the same amount of energy, three kilowaN-hours in the coal that
in the one pound of coal, he finds or it's three kilowaN-hours of reduced electricity use in his
home.

So, let's look at where the energy comes from. So, coal has to be mined, so that takes some
amount of energy, then coal needs to be transported, this takes energy as well, then we s6ll
look at the power genera6on, so coal plants are 25 to 35% efficient or so and then he uses a
home appliance as well, which has some sort of efficiency. If we look at that pound of coal,
although the coal itself, one pound might have three kilowaN hours of energy in it, it takes
much, much more energy to get three kilowaN hours of end use in your home. So, what this
means is that if you can reduce your energy use by three kilowaN-hours, you're actually
going to save a lot more energy than what is just involved in that coal because there's
efficiency and energy use all through that line. And so if we can limit our end use, this is a
bigger impact than on producing more energy from coal, for example, or from the source
itself. We'll just finish up here, looking at household energy use in Canada, we have space
hea6ng, as the number 1, 63% of our household energy uses space hea6ng, water hea6ng,
number two, and then we see appliances, ligh6ng and space cooling, air condi6oning, and so
we're going to talk about these in approximately this order here. We'll look at ways in which
this can be done in a more efficient way or ways in which we can conserve energy through
these.