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The Second Law of Economics pp 29–111Cite as

Energy

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Abstract

Energy is the capacity to cause changes in the world. It is stored in matter and force fields. The Sun produces energy by nuclear fusion. Solar irradiation, and reradiation and capture of the infrared by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, determine the climate on Earth and the environment for life. The combustion of coal, oil, and gas in heat engines, and non-fossil energy utilization, provide every citizen of the industrialized countries with energy services that are quantitatively equivalent to those of more than 40 hard-working men. They offer freedom from toil, comfort, mobility, information, and power. Transistors, running on electricity, work as powerful assistants to the human brain. A given energy quantity consists of a valuable part, called exergy, which can be converted into any form of physical work, and a useless part called anergy. Fossil and nuclear fuels, and solar radiation as well, are practically 100% exergy, and anergy is mostly heat at the temperature of the environment. All production processes in nature and industry decrease exergy and increase anergy. Energy consumption in this sense depletes the reserves of the easily accessible fossil fuels at a rate that, for oil, may soon culminate in peak Ooil. The potential of energy conservation and of non-fossil energy sources are assessed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    If m is the mass m 0 of a body at rest relative to an observer, this relation gives the amount of energy the observer would obtain from nuclear reactions that convert all of m 0 into energy. Similarly, if an electron and its antiparticle, the positron, meet, they annihilate and turn into photons, the quanta of electromagnetic radiation, whose energy is given by (2.1), m being the sum of the equal masses of the electron and the positron in this case. On the other hand, if a body moves with velocity v relative to the observer, one has \(m = {m}_{0}/{(1 -{\mathbf{v}}^{2}/{c}^{2})}^{1/2}\) in (2.1). A popular saying is that mass increases with velocity, although Einstein objected to talking about the mass of a moving body (letter dated June 19, 1948 to L. Barnett). Einstein preferred to describe the inertia of rapidly moving bodies by the concepts of energy, momentum and rest mass m 0 [2]. In any case, no rocket can exceed the velocity of light. Just to reach | v |  = c would require an infinite amount of energy. (That is why science fiction on space travel invented “jumps through hyperspace.”) Only massless “particles” such as photons propagate at the speed of light.

  2. 2.

    For instance, just to preserve the law of energy conservation for the β decay in nuclear reactions, Wolfgang Pauli postulated the existence of an uncharged particle with energy, spin 1/2, and vanishingly small mass in 1930. Enrico Fermi called it a “neutrino” in 1940. It was found experimentally in 1956.

  3. 3.

    The concept of “anergy” has been transferred from medicine and psychology. It has not yet been accepted as widely as “exergy,” where “availability” was one of the older names of the latter.

  4. 4.

    Inhibition of convection by the glass roof also contributes to warming.

  5. 5.

    Equations (2.27), (2.28), and (2.38) in Appendix 1 of Chap. 2 indicate how internal energy, i.e., chemical energy, is calculated and measured.

  6. 6.

    Switching devices such as relays and vacuum tubes are now information processors of minor importance.

  7. 7.

    Mc Cormick D-439: 26 kW, Fendt 824: 177 kW.

  8. 8.

    Lifting equipment 1,240 kW, scavenging pumps 720 kW, rotary table 360 kW (F. Holzförster, private communication). The power of drilling equipment units offered by Drill-Quest Engineering in Hünenberg, Switzerland, is 82.9 kW (112 hp) for a stationary diesel power unit and 555 kW (750 hp) for a mobile drilling rig.

  9. 9.

    The difference between the radiation energy in a room with wall temperature T and the same room with wall temperature T − ΔT is proportional to \({T}^{4} - {(T - \Delta T)}^{4} \approx 4{T}^{3}\Delta T\).

  10. 10.

    http://www.optoiq.com/index/photonics-technologies-applications/lfw-display/lfw-article-display/articles/optoiq2/photonics-technologies/news/applications-_markets/communications-_it/2010/8/BIANCHO-project.html.

  11. 11.

    OPEC is a cartel of 12 countries made up of Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela. OPEC has maintained its headquarters in Vienna since 1965.

  12. 12.

    Fusion in the Sun provides all renewable energies, except tidal power and those geothermal energies that result from the radioactive decay of minerals and volcanic activity.

  13. 13.

    http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.html.

  14. 14.

    A comparison of geothermal power plants with others by the US Department of Energy estimated the total area per megawatt of a coal-fired power plant to exceed 70,000 m2 (probably assuming strip mining of coal); http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/geopower_landuse.html.

  15. 15.

    Erneuerbare Energien Gesetz (“Renewable Energy Law”).

  16. 16.

    International Energy Agency.

  17. 17.

    Industriegewerkschaft Bergbau, Chemie, Energie, “Brancheninfo: Elektrizitätswirtschaft, Fakten und Daten zur deutschen Elektrizitätswirtschaft 2007 und Ausblick.”

  18. 18.

    IEA Key World Energy Statistics.

  19. 19.

    “The Future of Geothermal Energy”, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2006; http://geothermal.inel.gov/publications/future_of_geothermal_energy.pdf.

  20. 20.

    Where to draw the system boundaries properly is sometimes controversial. For instance, there are people who argue that photovoltaic cells will never reproduce the energy invested in their production, because in this energy one should include the fuel used by workers in factories producing photovoltaic cells, and during boat-trip vacations in the Caribbean, for example. Arguments of this quality are perhaps responsible for the persisting rumors that the harvest factors of photovoltaic cells and even wind power installations are less than 1.

  21. 21.

    CO2, NO x , SO2, and dust.

  22. 22.

    Emission reductions roughly follow energy savings.

  23. 23.

    The law (Erneuerbare Energien Gesetz) that stimulates the enormous growth of wind power and photovoltaics entitles windmill owners to feed their electricity into the grid at guaranteed feed-in tariffs, no matter whether the grid can take it or not.

  24. 24.

    In fact, 20 years later, Germany is the country with the highest electricity prices in Europe.

  25. 25.

    Häfele et al. [57] estimated that fusion reactors will produce about as much radioactive waste as fast breeder reactors. However, the radioactivity of the confinement material, which must be replaced periodically because of damage by neutron bombardment, dies off much more rapidly than the radioactivity of spent fuel rods from fission reactors.

  26. 26.

    Source: Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, http://www.ipp.mpg.de/.

  27. 27.

    The German Physical Society has more than 55,000 members and is the biggest physical society in the world.

  28. 28.

    The mathematician Joseph Lagrange discovered five special points in the vicinity of two orbiting masses where a third, smaller mass can orbit at a fixed distance from the larger masses. The Lagrange points mark the positions where the gravitational pull of the two large masses precisely provides the centripetal force required to rotate with them. Of the five Lagrange points, three are unstable and two are stable. The unstable Lagrange points – labeled L1, L2, and L3 – lie along the line connecting the two large masses. The stable Lagrange points – labeled L4 and L5 – form the apex of two equilateral triangles that have the large masses at their vertices.

  29. 29.

    http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/publications/index.htm.

  30. 30.

    More generally \({E}_{\mathrm{kin}} = (m - {m}_{0}){c}^{2} \approx (1/2){m}_{0}{\mathbf{v}}^{2} + (3{\mathbf{v}}^{2}/8{c}^{2}){m}_{0}{\mathbf{v}}^{2} + \ldots \). This becomes important when | v| approaches c, so \(m = {m}_{0}/{(1 -{\mathbf{v}}^{2}/{c}^{2})}^{1/2}\) differs substantially from m 0.

  31. 31.

    Quantum mechanics computes E r as the expectation value of the Hamiltonian (2.27) with | Φ r  > : \({E}_{r} =< {\Phi }_{r}\vert \mathcal{H}\vert {\Phi }_{r}\,>\).

  32. 32.

    Heat production is inconvenient for further evolution of computers, which has been characterized during the last four decades by a doubling of the density of transistors on a microchip every 18 months. If this trend and current trends of power consumption continue, the computer industry could possibly face the so-called Problem 2020, when the temperature of a miniaturized computer would be equal to the Sun’s temperature, because the Joule heat could no longer escape sufficiently rapidly out of the densely packed compound of transistors.

  33. 33.

    For instance, if one puts a pot of cold water on a hot plate, the heating process is not quasistatic, but the heat given off by the hot plate to the water can be simply calculated as the difference between the enthalpies of the water in the hot and in the cold state.

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  1. Institute for Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, University of Würzburg, Am Hubland, 97074, Würzburg, Germany

    Reiner Kümmel

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Kümmel, R. (2011). Energy. In: The Second Law of Economics. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9365-6_2

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