Title: What is energy?
Course: Archive > Section: Energy saving

OUR DEMAND FOR ENERGY

What is energy?

We depend on energy from the world around us to make electricity and fuel. We collect it from places where it's stored, as fuels like uranium or oil buried deep underground. Or we catch it as it passes, like the energy in flowing water or the wind.
Energy powers our lives, giving us light, warmth, transport and much more. We use energy from the world around us - e.g. from oil, uranium, wind or flowing water.
Energy that we can use to power our lives is all around us.
All the energy in our universe was created billions of years ago in a single moment called the 'big bang'.
Energy is everywhere and in everything. The most concentrated store of energy near to us is the Sun.
The energy in the Sun travels to Earth as sunlight. As soon as it reaches us the sunlight starts to become useful.
The energy flows from the Sun to the air, into the wind, into the waves, into clouds, into plants, into fossil fuels and power stations and into our homes and cars.
The number of paths that energy takes is infinite and all along the way the energy is spreading out.
But energy is most useful to us when we can store it. Nature stores energy using plants and more concentrated stores such as coal, oil and gas.
For thousands of years we have used this energy by burning plants, coal, oil and gas.
But in the last 300 years we have discovered and invented our own way of transferring energy using electricity and storing energy using batteries.

Energy quiz

Demand for power