Abstract
Technology purposely channels, concentrates, and transforms energy, matter, and information to improve the human condition. Continuous energy-rich fossil fuel use is the root cause of environmental degradation. Since matter is embodied energy and humankind’s demand for stuff is at an all-time high, energy sources directly affect future ecological prospects. The proposed solution of shifting to 100% renewable energy is complicated by the need for high embodied energy industrial processes. Understanding abstract concepts of energy is critical to finding solutions for unintended consequences at the root of environmental problems. This chapter demystifies energy terms and establishes conceptual foundations for designers to consider as they work through the primary challenges of consumption.
Technical language and abstract units can obfuscate and seemingly minimize the negative impacts of energy production. Major environmental impacts can hide in dense detail and make it easy for producers to externalize important environmental impacts or shift one ecological cost for another. This chapter provides brief introductions of classical thermodynamic concepts such as energy , exergy , and entropy , as well as the more recent concept of emergy . These and the larger underlying scientific phenomena that support them are at the heart of natural and anthropogenic ecological transformations in an industrialized world.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, in the United States alone, 28% of all energy used goes to moving people and goods. 58% of that is consumed by cars, light trucks, and motorcycles. http://needtoknow.nas.edu/energy/energy-use/transportation/
- 2.
The early twentieth century Haber-Bosch process, for example, produces ammonia-based fertilizer by heating air to over 700 degrees F and pressurizing it to over 2000 psi to extract nitrogen that is readily available for plants (Smil 2008).
- 3.
Anergy is not a classical thermodynamics term. Coined by the Head of Strategic Planning of Shell International Petroleum, Guy Jillings, in the 1980s, it has since been adopted by both statistical physics and immunobiology. It is a useful direct counterpart to exergy.
- 4.
This scientific and technological revolution is founded on his observations of planetary revolutions that he first distributed in his Little Commentary (1514). A few decades later he published mathematical descriptions of planetary motion in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 1543).
- 5.
Prior to this landmark work, Gottfried Leibniz published his paper, “A New Method for Maxima and Minima” in 1684 and is credited for developing calculus in parallel with Newton.
- 6.
Carnot acknowledges the practical and incremental contributions that produced ever more efficient engines by Thomas Newcomen, James Watt, and other English engineers in the opening pages of his seminal work.
- 7.
Notable exceptions were sailing ships propelled by wind and mills that employed the kinetic energy of wind and water to operate when these renewable energy resources were flowing (Smil 2008, p. 201).
- 8.
- 9.
The original Greek word for work – ἔργον (ergon) is added to the word for in – εν (en) to form the compound ενέργεια (energeia) from which the word energy is derived (Smil 2008).
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Cays, J. (2021). The Energy Essential: Physical Forces Animate All Things. In: An Environmental Life Cycle Approach to Design. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63802-3_2
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