Texas: Wind and Efficiency - Earth: The Operators' Manual

Type of Resource: Link

Reviews

No reviews

Be the first to write a review

Description

This engaging video focuses on national and global wind energy potential by specifically highlighting Texas' role as wind energy leader and energy efficiency efforts in Houston, Texas.

Energy is a quantitative property of a system that depends on the motion and interactions of matter and radiation within that system. That there is a single quantity called energy is due to the fact that a system’s total energy is conserved, even as, within the system, energy is continually transferred from one object to another and between its various possible forms.

At the macroscopic scale, energy manifests itself in multiple ways, such as in motion, sound, light, and thermal energy.

Although energy cannot be destroyed, it can be converted to less useful forms—for example, to thermal energy in the surrounding environment.

Humans depend on Earth’s land, ocean, atmosphere, and biosphere for many different resources. Minerals, fresh water, and biosphere resources are limited, and many are not renewable or replaceable over human lifetimes. These resources are distributed unevenly around the planet as a result of past geologic processes.

Motion energy is properly called kinetic energy; it is proportional to the mass of the moving object and grows with the square of its speed.

A system of objects may also contain stored (potential) energy, depending on their relative positions.

When the motion energy of an object changes, there is inevitably some other change in energy at the same time.

All forms of energy production and other resource extraction have associated economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical costs and risks as well as benefits. New technologies and social regulations can change the balance of these factors.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be transported from one place to another and transferred between systems.

Mathematical expressions, which quantify how the stored energy in a system depends on its configuration (e.g. relative positions of charged particles, compression of a spring) and how kinetic energy depends on mass and speed, allow the concept of conservation of energy to be used to predict and describe system behavior.

The availability of energy limits what can occur in any system.

Changes of energy and matter in a system can be described in terms of energy and matter flows into, out of, and within that system.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed—it only moves between one place and another place, between objects and/or fields, or between systems.

Energy may take different forms (e.g. energy in fields, thermal energy, energy of motion).

Within a natural or designed system, the transfer of energy drives the motion and/or cycling of matter.