Making Electricity
How is electricity produced you may ask? First, the question of what is electricity should be addressed. Electricity is a form of energy, and is the most widely used form. Energy cannot be created or destroyed therefore electricity cannot be created, so how is electricity obtained?
Electricity is a secondary source of energy; it has to be converted from primary sources of energy such as coal, natural gas, diesel and other natural sources like wind. Electricity is produced using an electric generator which converts mechanical energy to electricity. This process is based on the relationship between magnetism and electricity. When a wire or any other electrically conductive material moves across a magnetic field, an electric current occurs in the wire. Most electric utility power stations use turbines, engines, water wheels or similar machines to drive the electric generators.
As stated earlier, electricity is produced by converting a primary source of energy into electrical energy. LUCELEC uses diesel energy as their primary source of energy (each gallon of diesel contains 139,292 BTU or 146,813,768 joules of energy). For this process a large internal combustion engine is used to convert chemical energy stored in diesel to mechanical energy required to drive generators.
Diesel engines are said to be very inefficient because only 30-40% of the fuel is actually converted to energy. The other 60-70% is dissipated as sound and heat. Elaborate exhaust and silencing systems and cooling systems are needed to extract this heat and sound.
In 2009 LUCELEC produced 362,990,334 kWh of electricity, from 18,256,738 gallons of diesel.