Tag: energy

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What is electricity? – Electricity Explained

What is electricity? How does electricity work? What do electrons do? What is short circuiting? These are all questions answered in this video: A fundamental explainer on what electricity is and how it works.

In following videos we’ll look at voltage, ampere, ohm (resistance) and many more electricity related topics. All of this is to build a foundation of knowledge to serve all the future (and past) videos here on Into The Ordinary.

A couple of choices were made during the production of this video, that can be helpful to know:

  • I chose to mention the Bohr-model in relation to the orbital model to bring the point across that there is more to atoms than just this. The What Are Atoms? video better explains orbitals than this video does, though.
  • I intentionally used the word “shells” instead of orbits because it better catches what electrons are in real life, although still a simplification. This video is about electricity, not particle physics.
  • Power generation, how batteries work, amps, volts, ohms, are all topics I want to address in separate videos.
  • There will probably be a few more questions about this video, which I will try to address in the comments or in the description, here.

Never directly connect a wire to both holes of a wall socket, and never directly connect a wire to both ends of a battery! This can be dangerous and potentially life-threatening!

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Why The Tesla Semi Is The Future of Trucks

The personal transportation industry has been shaken up over the past decade or so, with the introduction of electric cars proving to be more environmentally friendly, and importantly, cheaper to run, than their petrol or diesel counterparts. Bike manufacturers are also working on the transition in the motorcycle segment.

While this change has been taking place, trucking has been continuing unchanged in the background. Our food, household goods, and even electric car parts, have been transported by diesel power just like they have been from the start, while the industry has grown to be worth $700 billion in the US alone, more than many of the world’s countries’ GDPs.

With the huge weights involved, electrifying the trucking industry has taken a back seat due to the impracticality, but at the end of 2017, 3 years ago, Tesla announced plans to change this with the Semi, a fully electric truck designed to shake up the shipping industry.

Why The Tesla Semi Is The Future of Trucks

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The UK Is Racing to Build the World’s First Commercial Fusion Power Plant

There are many directions we could go when it comes to the future of sustainable energy—but the UK made a bold move when it announced a huge investment (220 million pounds huge) in a prototype fusion power facility that could be functioning as a commercial power plant by 2040.

So it’s safe to say the race to fusion power is on. Fusion energy could provide us with clean, basically limitless energy.

But the thing is, fusion power isn’t really a reality yet, but does this prototype facility have a shot at making fusion a reality?

Nuclear fusion is what powers stars, including the sun. The ‘fusion’ part refers to the fact that isotopes of extremely light elements like hydrogen, are fusing together at the extremely high temperatures and pressures that exist at the center of stars. Under these conditions, gases like helium and hydrogen actually exist as plasmas.

So how could we possibly recreate what happens inside of stars here on Earth? By replicating those extreme conditions so that we can get the atoms to behave the way we want them to.

And that involves creating plasmas, or taking gases to very high temperatures and densities, which a number of innovative facilities do in a variety of ways.

One of these facilities is called ITER, which means ’the way’ in Latin. ITER is a major international fusion collaboration that’s been in progress since 1985.

China, the EU, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the U.S. are all contributing members who have agreed to fund ITER’s goal of producing fusion energy that could power our world.

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