11 Facts About Energy quality

Energy quality is a measure of the ease with which a form of energy can be converted to useful work or to another form of energy: i e its content of thermodynamic free energy.

The concept of energy quality is used in ecology, where it is used to track the flow of energy between different trophic levels in a food chain and in thermoeconomics, where it is used as a measure of economic output per unit of energy.

Methods of evaluating energy quality often involve developing a ranking of energy qualities in hierarchical order.

Consideration of energy quality was a fundamental driver of industrialization from the 18th through 20th centuries.

The search for higher quality energy was a major impetus throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

However energy engineers were aware that the notion of heat quality involved the notion of value – for example A Thumann wrote, "The essential quality of heat is not the amount but rather its 'value'" – which brings into play the question of teleology and wider, or ecological-scale goal functions.

One of the main differences that distinguishes these classes is the assumption of whether energy quality can be upgraded in an energy transformation process.

From this view, in contrast with that outlined by Ohta, energy quality is upgraded in the multistage trophic conversions of ecological systems.

All these differences in energy quality are therefore easily measured with the appropriate scientific instrument.

Ohta sought to order energy form conversions according to their quality and introduced a hierarchical scale for ranking energy quality based on the relative ease of energy conversion .

Odum energy quality rank is based on the amount of energy of one form required to generate a unit of another energy form.