Energy is Conserved

Energy is very difficult to define because it encompasses such a wide array of physical phenomena.  Energy is everywhere and it does everything you can imagine.  The most fundamental property of energy is that in all instances we know of energy is conserved.  If the idea that energy is conserved doesn’t seem incredible to you then you may not have thought about it deeply enough yet.  In every single scenario you can think the total amount of energy stays the same.  In fact, the conservation principle is the essence of what energy is.  Perhaps the best definition of energy is that energy is conserved.  This site will provide resources for making sense of and applying the idea principle of energy conservation in a wide array of scenarios.

Energy conservation can be understood in a couple of different ways:

• In all physical processes energy can transfer and change form but it is never created or destroyed.
• The total change of energy in any system is always equal to the total energy transferred into or out of the system.
• Energy conservation can be quantitatively analyzed using various forms of the energy conservation equation.

 

If energy is always conserved why are people so concerned with saving energy?