Energy Flashcards
What is primary energy?
- Fuels that provide energy without undergoing any conversion process
What is secondary energy?
- Energy that is made from processing of primary fuels
Concerning energy what is a measure of a country’s developement?
- The amount of energy a country uses
Who are the major producers of energy in the world?
- USA
- Canda
- Western Europe
- Russia
- Middle East
- Australia
- New Zealand
Who are the worlds major consumers of energy?
- The major producers becayse they have the reserves
What is the energy gap?
- A gap created because the loss of energy caused by phasing out fossil fuels is greater than the amount of energy that is being developed from new, low-carbon sources.
What two things are becoming very clear in today’s world energy?
- Energy must be used sparingly and with the utmost efficiency
- The non-renewable sources of energy are finite and must be conserved
How has the UK’s energy production changed from 1990 to 2008?
- Coal = 64.2% to 36.9%
- Oil = 11% to 1.3%
- Gas = 1% to 34.5%
What are the advantages of coal?
- High world reserves
- Newer mines are highly mechanised
What are the disadvantages of coal?
- Pollution
- Mining can be difficult and dangerous
- Opencast pits destroy land
- Heavy/bulkly to transport
What are the advantages of oil?
- Variety of uses
- Fairly easy to transport
- Efficient
- Less pollution than coal
What are the disadvantages of oil?
- Low reserves
- Some air pollution
- Danger of spills and explosions
What are the advantages of natural gas?
- Efficient
- Clean
- Easy to transport
What are the disadvantages of natural gas?
- Explosions
- Some air pollution
What are the advantages of nuclear?
- Clean
- Fewer greenhouse gases
- Efficient
- Small amount of raw materials used
- Small amounts of waste
What are the disadvantages of nuclear?
- Dangers of radiation
- High cost of building and decommissioning pwoer stations
- Probelms over dispoal of waste
- Nuclear accidents
What are the advantages of wind?
- Very clean
- No air pollution
- Small-scale and large-scale schemes possible
- Cheap to run
What are the disadvantages of wind?
- Winds are unpredictable and not constant
- Visual and noise pollution quiet, rural areas
What are the advantages of solar?
- Used in most part of the world
- Unlimited supplies
- Efficient
What are the disadvantages of solar?
- Expensive
- Needs sunglight
- Cloud/night means solar energy is reduced
What are the advantages of biofuel?
- Widley available, especially in LICs
- Uses waste products
- Can be used at a local level
What are the disadvantages of biofuel?
- Expensive to set up
- Waste cannot be recycled
- Some pollution
