Energy transformation

The energy in many of its forms may be used in natural processes, or to provide some service to society such as heating, refrigeration, lighting or performing mechanical work to operate machines.

When it reaches the furthest point, it will reverse the process, accelerating and converting potential energy into kinetic.

This is because thermal energy represents a particularly disordered form of energy; it is spread out randomly among many available states of a collection of microscopic particles constituting the system (these combinations of position and momentum for each of the particles are said to form a phase space).

In order to make energy transformation more efficient, it is desirable to avoid thermal conversion.

In a similar chain of transformations beginning at the dawn of the universe, nuclear fusion of hydrogen in the Sun releases another store of potential energy which was created at the time of the Big Bang.

], space expanded and the universe cooled too rapidly for hydrogen to completely fuse into heavier elements.

This resulted in hydrogen representing a store of potential energy which can be released by nuclear fusion.

Considering the solar system, starlight, overwhelmingly from the Sun, may again be stored as gravitational potential energy after it strikes the Earth.

This occurs in the case of avalanches, or when water evaporates from oceans and is deposited as precipitation high above sea level (where, after being released at a hydroelectric dam, it can be used to drive turbine/generators to produce electricity).

One example is a hurricane, which occurs when large unstable areas of warm ocean, heated over months, give up some of their thermal energy suddenly to power a few days of violent air movement.

Sunlight is also captured by plants as a chemical potential energy via photosynthesis, when carbon dioxide and water are converted into a combustible combination of carbohydrates, lipids, and oxygen.