Posts Tagged ‘animals and plants’
What is energy?
Energy comes mostly in the form of heat and light, and there are two types of energy: working energy and stored energy. Stored energy becomes working energy when we use it. We use energy every day – to grow our food, warm and cool our homes, make our electricity, run our cars, cook, and make products like clothes and toys, and even energy from food to keep us alive.
Most of the time we use stored energy for fuel. Burning fuel sets free the stored energy in the form of heat. Wood was once the principal way we found heat, but now we mostly burn ‘fossil fuels’ – liquid fuels, natural gas, and coal.
We call them fossil fuels, because they are formed from the fossils (or remains) of animals and plants that died and became buried under dirt and rock millions of years ago. We call fossil fuels ‘non-renewable’ – simply because we haven’t got millions of years to wait for a ‘new’ supply of liquid fuels, gas and coal.
Renewable energy is drawn from natural sources such as sun, wind, biomass, and water. Two major technologies are solar and wind power, which can provide supplementary energy at peak times.
