¶ Understanding Energy and Electricity
Hello and welcome to today I learned climate. This is Laura Hesi Fisher from the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative. We're in the middle of our Energy and Climate series, which we're running in collaboration with the MIT Energy Initiative. We have been talking about how our electric grid works and where we get our energy from in the US, and we were just about to dive into a suite of clean energy solutions.
But then we thought it'd be a good idea to take a second to take a breather and really get clear on what we're talking about when we're talking about energy. So here is a mini episode on just that. Here we go. In everyday language, we often use energy and electricity interchangeably. But the difference between these two words is actually really important. Energy is kind of a catch-all term, whereas electricity is a specific form of energy. Think of a fire.
And think of the flames of a fire as energy. The flames can warm a pot of water for cooking pasta, or they can keep a room warm. You can put a pan on top and melt down some metal. You could also boil the water to create steam that turns a turbine and generates electricity. So there are two things at play here. There's what's being burned to produce the flames, you know, like wood or coal or gas. And then there's how the heat from the flames are being used, like to boil water or to warm the air.
So you see energy can be generated in a lot of different ways and can be used to do lots of different kinds of things. And making electricity is one of those things.
¶ How the US Uses Energy
In fact, only about forty percent of the energy that's used in the United States is used to make electricity, which, you know, powers our lights, our computers, our appliances, our air conditioning units. Electricity is typically made in big power plants and then travels over wires to our buildings, like Harvey Michaels explained in our first episode.
So what about the other sixty percent of the energy that's used in the US? Well this isn't used to produce electricity, some of it is used to produce heat for our homes and buildings and to heat our water. There aren't really heat power plants because heat is a really hard thing to transfer over a long distance. So instead, typically oil or natural gas is piped into buildings from refineries and burned on site.
That's what water heaters and furnaces do. A lot of energy is also consumed by industry and manufacturing plants, who use it to help create products like paper and steel and plastics and chemicals. And about thirty percent of our energy in the US is used to power our cars, trucks, planes, ships, and other forms of transportation.
And as John Riley talked about in our last episode, we fill our tanks with oil in the form of gasoline or diesel or jet fuel, and our engines burn this oil to power our vehicles.
¶ Electrification for Climate Solutions
So we have these big power plants generating electricity and producing CO two. And we have our furnaces and our water heaters and our cars, that are like millions of sources of heat and power and also CO two. As Harvey Michaels mentioned in our first episode, one strategy to reduce CO2 from energy is to electrify heat and transportation. This would get rid of these millions of sources of CO2. Instead of burning gas to heat water in our homes, we'd all use electric water heaters.
Instead of oil to fuel our cars, we'd all have electric cars that we plug into electrical outlets. And then at the same time, we make it so that our electricity is being created in a way that doesn't produce CO two. So in the next set of episodes, we're going to talk about these ways to generate electricity that doesn't produce CO2.
There is a lot of work being put into areas of our economy that are hard to electrify, like making steel, which requires super high temperatures, or flying planes that use super powerful jet fuel. both of which would be really hard to do with electricity. But most of our energy use can be electrified, so that's what we'll be focusing on. Okay? Okay, we are good to launch into the rest of the season. Stay tuned for next week where we dig into wind and solar power, and thank you for listening.