Where do we waste energy most at?

[Rdivine]

Hi guys! This post isn't about spaceflight, but more about science. Where do we waste energy most at?

This question is to find out which aspect of our lives consume energy most inefficiently, and if this trend may be true if alien life exists. Share your answers below!

[Hannu2]

Aliens have same natural laws as we have. They have same elements, same chemical (and nuclear) reactions and same thermodynamics. If we do not talk about technomagic I would expect somewhat similar efficiency of their industrial processes. Maybe some advanced civilization can produce significantly more energy, for example by using nuclear reactions or materials from asteroids in their solar systems, but I do not see much possibilities to clearly higher efficiency.

If you think that wasting is energy consumption to non necessary entertaining purposes, not much can be said. I believe that aliens have developed in biological evolution process like humans and they are greedy for power and resources like humans. Otherwise they would have been extinct. I do not know if intelligent species can overcome that and what would follow if some species did that. I think pessimistically that also scientific curiosity is tied to greed for power. It may be that alien without it would care their little gardens and hobbies instead of pursuing higher material living standards or understanding of universe after moderate level.

[Spaceception]

Probably cars, most energy is lost due to overcoming friction,

Or fossil fuel plants.

[Kobymaru]

1 hour ago, Rdivine said:

Hi guys! This post isn't about spaceflight, but more about science. Where do we waste energy most at?

This question is to find out which aspect of our lives consume energy most inefficiently, and if this trend may be true if alien life exists. Share your answers below!

Subjectively: heating. It always bugged me that we produce so much waste heat from various processes that we blow out into the atmosphere, and then have to burn delicous, low-entropy, high energy-dense fuel to keep us warm.

In cold, hard numbers it's probably transport because of the inefficient gasoline engines or industrial processes.

 

[sevenperforce]

Anything that would be made more efficient by the use of room-temperature superconductors. 

[kerbiloid]

How much energy is consumed in the world by each sector?

 

[peadar1987]

In terms of waste, it's thermal power plants. They dump between 50% and 70% of the energy in their fuel into the environment due to Carnot limitations. Then we burn more fuel to heat up our homes. If I had a billion pounds to spend on improving the energy sector, I wouldn't look at fusion, renewables, or carbon capture, I would pump it all into combined heat and power schemes, either directly using the heat, or using adsorption chillers in hotter climates.

[lajoswinkler]

Heat. And I don't mean waste heat, I mean wasting precious heat that bleeds out when it shouldn't.

[Darnok]

On industry, because we manufacture products that has very short live, we should make TVs that could be used for over 20 or even 30 years... it is XXI century?

Making long-live products we would save not only energy, but also resources (metals for example) and environment less mines, less logistics, less chemicals dropped into rivers and oceans.

[StrandedonEarth]

2 hours ago, Darnok said:

On industry, because we manufacture products that has very short live, we should make TVs that could be used for over 20 or even 30 years... it is XXI century?

Making long-live products we would save not only energy, but also resources (metals for example) and environment less mines, less logistics, less chemicals dropped into rivers and oceans.

Durable products have a bit of a catch-22. If something is built to last 20-50 years, then there is less incentive to upgrade to newer, better, more efficient products since there is so much 'life' left in the old one. Manufacturers also run into trouble of not being able to sell much more of something once everyone has it. That's why planned obsolescence became a thing, so the manufacturers could stay in business making more things. A perfect example is the original Corningware, which was ovenware made from pyroceram, a material intended to protect missile payloads during reentry. That stuff was incredibly durable and could take a lot of abuse. Once you bought it, you wouldn't have to buy more.

The most wasteful things in todays society are waste heat and 'vampire consumption.' Cogeneration needs to be more of a thing, where waste heat is also put to work. A lot of older city areas have an underground steam network, because it's more efficient to have a central steam source piped around to where it's needed. Vampire consumption is all these transformers plugged in everywhere for a device that is 'turned off.' Even if the device is actually off and not on standby, that 'power brick' is still sucking a few milliwatts of power. City-wide, that starts to add up.

Edited March 10, 2016 by StrandedonEarth
typo, this keyboard sucks. I really have to pound it or it misses some letters. Especially 'i'

[NuclearNut]

26 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Durable products have a bit of a catch-22. If something is built to last 20-50 years, then there is less incentive to upgrade to newer, better, more efficient products since there is so much 'life' left in the old one. Manufacturers also run into trouble of not being able to sell much more of something once everyone has it. That's why planned obsolescence became a thing, so the manufacturers could stay in business making more things. A perfect example is the original Corningware, which was ovenware made from pyroceram, a material intended to protect missile payloads during reentry. That stuff was incredibly durable and could take a lot of abuse. Once you bought it, you wouldn't have to buy more.

The most wasteful things in todays society are waste heat and 'vampire consumption.' Cogeneration needs to be more of a thing, where waste heat is also put to work. A lot of older city areas have an underground steam network, because it's more efficient to have a central steam source piped around to where it's needed. Vampire consumption is all these transformers plugged n everywhere for a device that is 'turned off.' Even if the device is actually off and not on standby, that 'power brick' is still sucking a few milliwatts of power. City-wide, that starts to add up.

The only issue with CHP is the air pollution it produces assuming you utilize fossil fuels.

[Darnok]

34 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Durable products have a bit of a catch-22. If something is built to last 20-50 years, then there is less incentive to upgrade to newer, better, more efficient products since there is so much 'life' left in the old one. Manufacturers also run into trouble of not being able to sell much more of something once everyone has it. That's why planned obsolescence became a thing, so the manufacturers could stay in business making more things. A perfect example is the original Corningware, which was ovenware made from pyroceram, a material intended to protect missile payloads during reentry. That stuff was incredibly durable and could take a lot of abuse. Once you bought it, you wouldn't have to buy more.

So how can I upgrade my TV with 5 years of usage? Only way it to buy new one, but that is not upgrade that is forcing people to buy new stuff.
How can I upgrade my laptop, tablet or smartphone? I liked PCs because I was able to upgrade them... but today it is insane, we have to buy single use products. It is not only waste of energy and resources, but also waste of money.

Wait, but technology and industry is not made for manufacturers to have business running 24/7, it is for us consumers to have easier life.
So if "everyone has it" it means there is too much of this product on market and it is time to invest into something brand new or invent new technology that nobody has to earn money, right?
This is what pushed companies to new branches of technology and to new ideas... but now we can have TV with 100 pixels larger resolution every 2 years, so much progress, so great new technology and innovation just WOW.
 

[wumpus]

4 hours ago, Spaceception said:

Probably cars, most energy is lost due to overcoming friction,

Or fossil fuel plants.

Car energy "waste" is pretty complicated.  Basically, it takes about 30hp to maintain a fairly aerodynamic car at highway speeds (double or triple that for light trucks).  Also note that most cars do more poorly driving around city streets accelerating and decelerating, so obviously that is typically done in an inefficient way.

If you are driving something like a prius that has a ~60hp (gas) engine, your engine will be relatively efficient producing 30hp.  For everyone else, producing 30hp isn't something they are all that good at.  Oddly enough, larger engines are (technically) more efficient at producing power, the problem is that they tend to produce power efficiently at 100hp or more (which is great if you are going 100mph+, otherwise it will simply accelerate you until you are going 100mph+).  A graph of Brake-specific-horsepower is shown below.  The red part is the area where the engine is most efficient, and the dots indicate random samples of the car's driving.  From poor memory, I think the car was an early saturn, which had around ~120hp.  Expect modern engines to have islands twice as high as seen in the graph (but the dots only slightly higher, although modern cars are *much* heavier than plastic saturns).

My understanding of fossil fuel plants (at least the more recently built ones) is that they are pretty close to Carnot efficiency (meaning that there is *no* *way* to increase efficiency beyond that while burning the fuel).  This means they should be about as good as possible for turning motors in machinery, but that you should avoid using them for direct heating (heat pump efficiency depends largely on the heat source they are pumping).

[Elthy]

I would think quite much is wasten on unneccessary stuff like:

Driving by car when you can take the bus
Letting lights on where noone needs it, especialy at night (why are industrial areas brightly lit in the night even when i know they are only working there on the day?)
Leaving PC running while leavin the house (im looking at you, brother)
Extreme airconditioning (i visited Texas a few years ago. Why do i have to freeze indoors when its 40°C outside?)
Extreme heating (noone needs more than 20-21°C in a house)
 

Also there are many houses not insulated properly. Even in germany the government thats an issue, my suggestion to change that: Extra tax on oil/gas used for heating, subsidize insulation using that money. In general people should be nudged to saving energy by making oil/gas/energy more expensive with taxes. Noone was killed when fuel was 1,60€ two years back in germany, now its only 1,10€ and everyone is driving even more...

[AngelLestat]

Ok.  some said waste heat.. but it does not answer the question, because heat is the most elusive form of energy, so in global average yeah, but we need to specify a practical process in which we lost most of the energy.

For me, the process in where we are most inefficient is in personal transport. 
There are trains or bus that are efficient, but a big % of the population just travels in a car (alone or with somebody).
In resume, we are moving 1200 kg (with an efficiency of 28%) from point A to B just to transport 70 or 150 kg.
That is very inefficient.

Edited March 10, 2016 by AngelLestat

[insert_name]

I understand food waste can be a huge waste of energy. we transport fertilizer and water to a farm, transport the crop to the factory, process the food, transport the food and packaging to the store, and then from the store to a home, and then to a landfill. 

[GeneralVeers]

7 hours ago, Rdivine said:

Hi guys! This post isn't about spaceflight, but more about science. Where do we waste energy most at?

This question is to find out which aspect of our lives consume energy most inefficiently, and if this trend may be true if alien life exists. Share your answers below!

Did you mean biologically?

If so, then a big factor in lost energy lies in the size of a person. Heat escapes from your body at a rate depending on your surface area (not your volume), which means larger creatures lose less heat per unit body weight. A mouse eats a quarter of its body weight each day. You? Three to five pounds. Smaller creatures are more wasteful in terms of having to eat more per unit body weight. (and you wondered why Hobbits and dwarves in the LOTR movies eat so much?? it's because they're small! it's science!)

If you meant stuff besides biology (i.e. technology)? I can only guess at that, but I can say just about everybody in this thread has it backwards. There's been a lot of chat about how energy is lost from cars and power plants and such. A thousand years ago, when, say, power plants didn't exist, humans simply did without. No cell phones, no electric lights, no computers, no Kerbal Space Program chat forum. Then somebody came up with an idea: dig up some coal (which was sitting in the ground doing nothing) build a power plant, burn the coal, boil water, spin a turbine, generate electricity! And suddenly we had energy we didn't have before. When you have more than you did, that's not waste. That's production. The old sound bite about "but we could produce more than we did" makes people appear wasteful by exploiting a hypothetical thing that didn't actually happen. Yes, we "could have" produced 47 widgets, but we "did" produce 46, which is greater than zero.

Which leads to the one true measure of waste: time. Sitting around doing nothing? Not producing anything? That's waste.

[insert_name]

2 minutes ago, GeneralVeers said:

Did you mean biologically?

If so, then a big factor in lost energy lies in the size of a person. Heat escapes from your body at a rate depending on your surface area (not your volume), which means larger creatures lose less heat per unit body weight. A mouse eats a quarter of its body weight each day. You? Three to five pounds. Smaller creatures are more wasteful in terms of having to eat more per unit body weight. (and you wondered why Hobbits and dwarves in the LOTR movies eat so much?? it's because they're small! it's science!)

If you meant stuff besides biology (i.e. technology)? I can only guess at that, but I can say just about everybody in this thread has it backwards. There's been a lot of chat about how energy is lost from cars and power plants and such. A thousand years ago, when, say, power plants didn't exist, humans simply did without. No cell phones, no electric lights, no computers, no Kerbal Space Program chat forum. Then somebody came up with an idea: dig up some coal (which was sitting in the ground doing nothing) build a power plant, burn the coal, boil water, spin a turbine, generate electricity! And suddenly we had energy we didn't have before. When you have more than you did, that's not waste. That's production. The old sound bite about "but we could produce more than we did" makes people appear wasteful by exploiting a hypothetical thing that didn't actually happen. Yes, we "could have" produced 47 widgets, but we "did" produce 46, which is greater than zero.

Which leads to the one true measure of waste: time. Sitting around doing nothing? Not producing anything? That's waste.

from what I understand production can still produce byproduct. also not taking advantage of possible opportunities is considered wasteful from an economic prospective

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, Elthy said:

why are industrial areas brightly lit in the night even when i know they are only working there on the day?

Security. Less vulnerable to thieves breaking in to steal office equipment and anything else they think they can sell. Also to make it easier for responding emergency vehicles if a fire breaks out, etc.

[AngelLestat]

10 minutes ago, GeneralVeers said:

Then somebody came up with an idea: dig up some coal (which was sitting in the ground doing nothing) build a power plant, burn the coal, boil water, spin a turbine, generate electricity! And suddenly we had energy we didn't have before. When you have more than you did, that's not waste. 

Following that theory then energy must be free as many Tesla fans conspirators suggest.
But energy never is free, you can make a windmill and obtain "free"  energy over its lifetime, but you spend resources and work to obtain that energy, and when it breaks someone needs to repair it or remplace it, you need to distribute that energy and storage it.
So if it takes you "work" to obtain energy, then you should not waste it.
 

[fredinno]

10 hours ago, Hannu2 said:

Aliens have same natural laws as we have. They have same elements, same chemical (and nuclear) reactions and same thermodynamics. If we do not talk about technomagic I would expect somewhat similar efficiency of their industrial processes. Maybe some advanced civilization can produce significantly more energy, for example by using nuclear reactions or materials from asteroids in their solar systems, but I do not see much possibilities to clearly higher efficiency.

If you think that wasting is energy consumption to non necessary entertaining purposes, not much can be said. I believe that aliens have developed in biological evolution process like humans and they are greedy for power and resources like humans. Otherwise they would have been extinct. I do not know if intelligent species can overcome that and what would follow if some species did that. I think pessimistically that also scientific curiosity is tied to greed for power. It may be that alien without it would care their little gardens and hobbies instead of pursuing higher material living standards or understanding of universe after moderate level.

A sufficiently advanced civilization would have almost unlimited energy via fusion and subatomic black hole power generation, so

9 hours ago, peadar1987 said:

In terms of waste, it's thermal power plants. They dump between 50% and 70% of the energy in their fuel into the environment due to Carnot limitations. Then we burn more fuel to heat up our homes. If I had a billion pounds to spend on improving the energy sector, I wouldn't look at fusion, renewables, or carbon capture, I would pump it all into combined heat and power schemes, either directly using the heat, or using adsorption chillers in hotter climates.

Yeah, problem with investing in greater efficiency is that it locks you in to GHG-producing power plants.

4 hours ago, insert_name said:

I understand food waste can be a huge waste of energy. we transport fertilizer and water to a farm, transport the crop to the factory, process the food, transport the food and packaging to the store, and then from the store to a home, and then to a landfill. 

That's actually more of a topsoil and water waste than energy waste.

[insert_name]

40 minutes ago, fredinno said:

A sufficiently advanced civilization would have almost unlimited energy via fusion and subatomic black hole power generation, so

Yeah, problem with investing in greater efficiency is that it locks you in to GHG-producing power plants.

That's actually more of a topsoil and water waste than energy waste.

you realize that they have to transport the stuff there right

[GeneralVeers]

4 hours ago, AngelLestat said:

Following that theory then energy must be free

Exactly. Heheh. That's probably not the reply you expected.

Think it through. You wad up a piece of newspaper and light it with a match. What do you get? A fire that's a lot bigger than the match! You put in a tiny amount of fire and get lots out, particularly if you end up setting the carpet on fire......

"But Veers, that's not what 'free' means!" blah blah, don't care.

In the same venue:

 

4 hours ago, insert_name said:

from what I understand production can still produce byproduct. also not taking advantage of possible opportunities is considered wasteful from an economic prospective

An economist will generally think of something this way: you've got some land and $1 million. You spend the million to build a factory that makes widgets, turning total sales of $3 million. End result: instead of land and $1 mil, you've got land, factory, and $2 mil. In other words, more than you had before.

Yes, by one means or another you might be able to build that factory for less, or make more widgets with less raw material or whatever. In some way or another, the building of the factory could have been "better". That doesn't change the fact that the building of the less-efficient factory is "good". The fallacy of "waste is bad" lies in the sneaky substitution of "good" for "better". There's always something else "better", folks. Faster computers, more efficient cars, cooler cell phones. Someone else in the world who's smarter or stronger or more attractive. Etcetera³.

Perfect efficiency is impossible. One way or another, you're going to find yourself stuck at "good enough".

[fredinno]

1 hour ago, insert_name said:

you realize that they have to transport the stuff there right

Beamed power.

[Hannu2]

6 hours ago, fredinno said:

A sufficiently advanced civilization would have almost unlimited energy via fusion and subatomic black hole power generation, so

This is what I called technomagic and excluded out. We do not know any examples of such civilizations and we do not know any means how that could be done obeying known natural laws. I know that nature have had and will have big surprises and we do not know everything. However, such surprises are typically something nobody can predict. Therefore at least I expect that scifi writers fantasies does not exist before we detect one of them.