Ambient energy

Ambient energy is nature’s energy that never gets harnessed by people. Society uses this energy without creating infrastructure to capture and transform it, but ambient energy is often useful. Energy sciences focuses on energy that people harness from nature. These fuels and flows of primary energy are gathered from nature to allow humans to have a high energy society. Extensive efforts to harness this energy makes it easy to ignore the benefits from energy that people use without gathering, but in ways that it's easy to ignore. This ambient energy is quite a bit more energy than all of the primary energy extracted from nature (both fuels and flows combined).

Sunlight is an illustrative example of this difference. People use sunlight to see as they walk around, which would be ambient energy. This sunlight is different from the sunlight gathered for photovoltaic cells and turn into electricity. Harnessed energy would be primary energy, since it’s gathered. There’s quite a bit more sunlight bouncing around our environment, enabling us to see, than we’ll ever capture in photovoltaic cells.

Other examples of ambient energy that are often ignored, but are nonetheless essential for people’s well being:

• The thermal energy in the Earth’s atmosphere that makes our planet the right temperature to support life.
• The chemical energy that went into making our atmospheric oxygen. Molecular oxygen in a planet’s atmosphere is incredibly rare, and took more than a billion years of sunlight-powered photosynthesis to make happen
• The kinetic energy of the Earth travelling around the Sun, which keeps us from falling into the sun.
• The rotational kinetic energy of the Earth spinning on its axis, giving the day-night cycle.
• The kinetic energy in the ocean’s currents that circulate nutrients and thermal energy.
• Energy in the Earth’s magnetic field that protects life from harmful cosmic rays.

Ambient energy requires no infrastructure and no investment by people, so it’s easy to ignore. Energy that we harness by design without transformation would also be considered ambient energy. Examples would include:

• Sunlight coming in through a window.
• Tides moving ships out to sea.
• A cooling breeze coming off a body of water

The term 'Ambient energy was created by the Energy Education team because we couldn’t find a name that anyone else used for this energy. We believe that this concept is important, but will happily change the phrase we use to describe this if someone can point to a more commonly used, or more clear phrase. Please contact us with a different phrase, if it exists.