Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. Most of us take the availability of electricity for granted. It is all around us and does so many things for us. But, as you might expect, some people do not have access to electricity. In 2005, what portion of the world population did NOT have access to electrical power?
2. Let's look at how the use of energy has improved our lives. We know that years ago, before we had electricity, steam engines, or petroleum-powered transport, a lot of things were done by human labor. If we consider all the energy used in homes, manufacturing, retail and all the other places to support our current lifestyle, how many people would it take to do each person's share of all the work without our current energy sources? This varies throughout the world, so let's think of the United States in 1999.
So, if one person could expend about one megawatt-hour of energy in a year, approximately how many energy servants were working for an average US resident in 1999?
3. We do not think about electricity too much. You turn on the switch and the light comes on. We get electricity from a number of sources. In the late years of the twentieth century what was the largest source of electrical power in the United States?
4. You may have heard of the term "capacity factor". For an electrical production plant this is the ratio of actual power generated in a time period (usually a year) to the power it would have produced it if that plant ran at its full capability during that entire time period. So, for the United States, which power source do you think has the greatest capacity factor?
5. You may know that in the United States we get about 20% of our electrical power from nuclear energy. However, for some states nearly half or more of the electricity they generate is from nuclear. Can you name them?
6. Across the United States the sources of electricity vary a great deal. Since the environmental impact of electrical power production varies significantly by the source of energy, the environmental impact of electrical power varies a lot from state to state. While this will shift somewhat over time, the massive investments required for major electrical generation systems means the general picture is not subject to rapid change.
One way to look at the "Greenness" of a state's electrical power production is to look at the amount of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide it generates per megawatt-hour of electricity produced in the state. If we do this and list them in decreasing order, how many of the states that get near 50% or more of their power from nuclear sources will be found among the twelve states with the lowest CO2/MWh?
7. Can you guess which state releases the highest amount of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour of generated electricity?
8. We see a lot of media excitement about solar energy. After all, sunlight is free, isn't it? It terms of cost of electricity power coming out of the generating plant, in the early few years twenty-first century, what was the cost of solar photovoltaic power relative to conventional fossil power, that is coal-fired electricity?
9. There has been some splash in the media about hydrogen-powered vehicles. These are really cool because when hydrogen burns all you get is pure water. What small problem do these media raves overlook?
10. You may know that nuclear power plants employ nuclear fission and that nuclear fission is the process in which heavy atoms are split apart releasing energy from that atom's nucleus. But do you know how that energy got stuffed into the heavy atom's nucleus in the first place?
Source: Author
MicjealS
This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor
CellarDoor before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.