Power and Energy Page 1
1. Nuclear Power Plants:
A nuclear power plant or nuclear power station is a thermal power station in which the heat source is a nuclear reactor. As it is typical of thermal power stations, heat is used to generate steam that drives a steam turbine connected to a generator that produces electricity. As of 23 April 2014, the IAEA report there are 449 nuclear power reactors in operation operating in 31 countries. Nuclear plants are usually considered to be base load stations since fuel is a small part of the cost of production and because they cannot be easily or quickly dispatched. Their operations and maintenance (O&M) and fuel costs are, along with hydropower stations, at the low end of the spectrum and make them suitable as base-load power suppliers. More details
Hydroelectricity is electricity produced from hydropower. In 2015 hydropower generated 16.6% of the world's total electricity and 70% of all renewable electricity, and was expected to increase about 3.1% each year for the next 25 years. Hydropower is produced in 150 countries, with the Asia-Pacific region generating 33 percent of global hydropower in 2013. China is the largest hydroelectricity producer, with 920 TWh of production in 2013, representing 16.9 percent of domestic electricity use. The cost of hydroelectricity is relatively low, making it a competitive source of renewable electricity. The hydro station consumes no water, unlike coal or gas plants. More details
3. Tidal Power:
Tidal power or tidal energy is the form of hydropower that converts the energy obtained from tides into useful forms of power, mainly electricity. Although not yet widely used, tidal energy has potential for future electricity generation. Tides are more predictable than the wind and the sun. Among sources of renewable energy, tidal energy has traditionally suffered from relatively high cost and limited availability of sites with sufficiently high tidal ranges or flow velocities, thus constricting its total availability. However, many recent technological developments and improvements, both in design and turbine technology, indicate that the total availability of tidal power may be much higher than previously assumed. More details
4. ITER (Nuclear Fusion Project):
ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject, which will be the world's largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment. It is an experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor that is being built next to the Cadarache facility in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, in Provence, southern France. The ITER thermonuclear fusion reactor has been designed to produce a fusion plasma equivalent to 500 megawatts of thermal output power for around twenty minutes while 50 megawatts of thermal power are injected into the tokamak, resulting in a ten-fold gain of plasma heating power. More details
5. Biomass:
Biomass is an industry term for getting energy by burning wood, and other organic matter. Burning biomass releases carbon emissions, but has been classed as a renewable energy source in the EU and UN legal frameworks, because plant stocks can be replaced with new growth. It has become popular among coal power stations, which switch from coal to biomass in order to convert to renewable energy generation without wasting existing generating plant and infrastructure. Biomass most often refers to plants or plant-based materials that are not used for food or feed, and are specifically called lignocellulosic biomass. More details
6. Coal Fired Power Plants:
Coal is the most abundant fossil fuel on the planet, and widely used as the source of energy in thermal power stations. It is a relatively cheap fuel, with some of the largest deposits in regions that are stable politically, such as China, India and the United States. In coal-fired power stations, the raw feed coal from the coal storage area is first crushed into small pieces and then conveyed to the coal feed hoppers at the boilers. The coal is pulverized into a very fine powder. The pulverizers may be ball mills, rotating drum grinders, or other types of grinders. More details
7. Solar Panels:
Photovoltaic solar panels absorb sunlight as a source of energy to generate electricity. A photovoltaic (PV) module is a packaged, connected assembly of typically 6x10 photovoltaic solar cells. Photovoltaic modules constitute the photovoltaic array of a photovoltaic system that generates and supplies solar electricity in commercial and residential applications. Each module is rated by its DC output power under standard test conditions (STC), and typically ranges from 100 to 365 Watts (W). The efficiency of a module determines the area of a module given the same rated output – an 8% efficient 230 W module will have twice the area of a 16% efficient 230 W module. More details
8. Solar Power Tower:
The solar power tower, also known as 'central tower' power plants or 'heliostat' power plants or power towers, is a type of solar furnace using a tower to receive the focused sunlight. It uses an array of flat, movable mirrors (called heliostats) to focus the sun's rays upon a collector tower (the target). Concentrated solar thermal is seen as one viable solution for renewable, pollution-free energy. Early designs used these focused rays to heat water, and used the resulting steam to power a turbine. Newer designs using liquid sodium have been demonstrated, and systems using molten salts (40% potassium nitrate, 60% sodium nitrate) as the working fluids are now in operation. More details
9. The Hydrogen House:
The Hydrogen House is North America's first regulation-approved solar-hydrogen powered residence. The home was developed by Mike Strizki with a grant from the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. The solar hydrogen system was completed in 2006 and has since received international acclaim. Located on an 11-acre plot of land in the rolling hills of Hopewell, New Jersey, the Hydrogen House operates by collecting solar energy from a 21-kilowatt array of solar panels mounted throughout Strizki's property. The energy from the 70 thin film and 80 polycrystalline panels passes through inverters where it is collected in a relatively small battery bank used to run a low-pressure electrolyzer. More details
A hydrogen vehicle is a vehicle that uses hydrogen as its onboard fuel for motive power. Hydrogen vehicles include hydrogen-fuelled space rockets, as well as automobiles and other transportation vehicles. The power plants of such vehicles convert the chemical energy of hydrogen to mechanical energy either by burning hydrogen in an internal combustion engine, or by reacting hydrogen with oxygen in a fuel cell to run electric motors. Widespread use of hydrogen for fuelling transportation is a key element of a proposed hydrogen economy. As of 2016, there are 3 hydrogen cars publicly available in select markets: the Toyota Mirai, the Hyundai ix35 FCEV, and the Honda Clarity. More details
Wind power is the use of air flow through wind turbines to provide the mechanical power to turn electric generators. Wind power, as an alternative to burning fossil fuels, is plentiful, renewable, widely distributed, clean, produces no greenhouse gas emissions during operation, consumes no water, and uses little land. The net effects on the environment are far less problematic than those of nonrenewable power sources. Wind farms consist of many individual wind turbines, which are connected to the electric power transmission network. Onshore wind is an inexpensive source of electric power, competitive with or in many places cheaper than coal or gas plants. More details
12. Geothermal Power:
Geothermal power is power generated by geothermal energy. Technologies in use include dry steam power stations, flash steam power stations and binary cycle power stations. Geothermal electricity generation is currently used in 24 countries, while geothermal heating is in use in 70 countries. As of 2015, worldwide geothermal power capacity amounts to 12.8 gigawatts (GW), of which 28 percent or 3,548 megawatts are installed in the United States. International markets grew at an average annual rate of 5 percent over the three years to 2015, and global geothermal power capacity is expected to reach 14.5–17.6 GW by 2020. More details
13. Wave Power:
Wave power is the capture of energy of wind waves to do useful work – for example, electricity generation, water desalination, or pumping water. A machine that exploits wave power is a wave energy converter (WEC). Wave power is distinct from tidal power, which captures the energy of the current caused by the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon. Waves and tides are also distinct from ocean currents which are caused by other forces including breaking waves, wind, the Coriolis effect, cabbeling, and differences in temperature and salinity. Wave-power generation is not a widely employed commercial technology, although there have been attempts to use it since at least 1890. More details
14. Solar Power:
Solar power is the conversion of energy from sunlight into electricity, either directly using photovoltaics (PV), indirectly using concentrated solar power, or a combination. Concentrated solar power systems use lenses or mirrors and tracking systems to focus a large area of sunlight into a small beam. Photovoltaic cells convert light into an electric current using the photovoltaic effect. Photovoltaics were initially solely used as a source of electricity for small and medium-sized applications, from the calculator powered by a single solar cell to remote homes powered by an off-grid rooftop PV system. Commercial concentrated solar power plants were first developed in the 1980s. More details
15. Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator:
A Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG) is an electrical generator that uses an array of thermocouples to convert the heat released by the decay of a suitable radioactive material into electricity by the Seebeck effect. This generator has no moving parts. RTGs have been used as power sources in satellites, space probes, and unmanned remote facilities such as a series of lighthouses built by the former Soviet Union inside the Arctic Circle. RTGs are usually the most desirable power source for unmaintained situations that need a few hundred watts (or less) of power for durations too long for fuel cells, batteries, or generators. More details
16. Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment:
The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) was an experimental molten salt reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) researching this technology through the 1960s; constructed by 1964, it went critical in 1965 and was operated until 1969. The MSRE was a 7.4 MWth test reactor simulating the neutronic "kernel" of a type of inherently safer epithermal thorium breeder reactor called the liquid fluoride thorium reactor. It primarily used two fuels: first uranium-235 and later uranium-233. The latter 233UF4 was the result of breeding from thorium in other reactors. More details
17. Floating Nuclear Power Plants:
Floating nuclear power stations are vessels designed by Rosatom. They are self-contained, low-capacity, floating nuclear power plants. The stations are to be mass-produced at shipbuilding facilities and then towed to the destination ports of the cities and towns experiencing deficit of power due to industrialization. The work on such projects dates back to MH-1A in the United States, which was built in the 1960s into the hull of a World War II Liberty Ship; however, the Rosatom project is the first floating nuclear power plant intended for mass production. The initial plan was to manufacture at least seven of the vessels by 2015. More details
18. History of Electricity:
Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. In the early days, electricity was considered as being unrelated to magnetism. Later on, experimental results and the development of Maxwell's equations indicated that both electricity and magnetism are from a single phenomenon: electromagnetism. Various common phenomena are related to electricity, including lightning, static electricity, electric heating, electric discharges and many others. Long before any knowledge of electricity existed, people were aware of shocks from electric fish. More details
19. Energy in China:
China is the world's leading country in electricity production from renewable energy sources, with over double the generation of the second-ranking country, the United States. By the end of 2018, the country had a total capacity of 728 GW of renewable power, mainly from hydroelectric and wind power. China's renewable energy sector is growing faster than its fossil fuels and nuclear power capacity. Although China currently has the world's largest installed capacity of hydro, solar and wind power, its energy needs are so large that in 2015 renewable sources provided only 24% of its electricity generation, with most of the remainder provided by coal power plants. More details
20. Electricity Generation:
Electricity generation is the process of generating electric power from sources of primary energy. For utilities in the electric power industry, it is the stage prior to its delivery to end users (transmission, distribution, etc.) or its storage (using, for example, the pumped-storage method). A characteristic of electricity is that it is not freely available in nature in large amounts, so it must be "produced". Production is carried out in power stations. Electricity is most often generated at a power plant by electromechanical generators, primarily driven by heat engines fueled by combustion or nuclear fission but also by other means such as the kinetic energy of flowing water and wind. More details
