What forms of energy are not derived from sunlight?
There are only four forces of nature in town:
1. Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR)
2. Gravity
3. Strong Force Nuclear
4. Weak Force Nuclear.
Virtually all of our EMR comes from the sun. The only other souces are stars and other celestial objects, plus the background radiation of the big bang. Concentrate them all and you still couldn’t light a fart.
That leaves gravity and nuclear.
From gravity we get tides, which cause water to move.
From the nuclear forces we get nuclear energy. Not just fission and fusion but geothermal energy, which is primarily a result of the radioactive decay of elements in the Earth’s core.
And that’s all she wrote.
Let’s take the question a little backwards. The sun produces energy, and plants absorb it and grow. It is plants that the horse eats. Large plant bodies buried underground turn into coal and oil which runs a car. The electric engine is more problematic because its energy could have come from a variety of sources, depending on the power plant. Coal and oil we already covered. Solar is pretty obvious. Sunlight also drives the winds and evaporates the water which rains down to run hydroelectric plants. But there are plenty of power plants that do not get their energy from the sun, even indirectly. Nuclear plants use the energy stored in radioactive materials (which are older than the sun itself!). Geothermal plants use heat from the Earth’s core (which came from friction, gravity, and perhaps more of those radioactive materials). And there are some power stations that produce energy from tidal waves which get their power from the Sun and the Moon’s gravity, not light. Pretty much any batt
Photosynthesis, driven by photons, takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and combining it with H2O creates glucose (C6H12O6) and oxygen. The plants use these chemical bonds it forms for long term energy storage. Plants can’t store the suns energy as it arrives but they can store chemical energy. This is the primary trophic level. The plant then uses its glucose for its own respiration or to make into polysaccharides like starch for food and cellulose for structure. There are two directions now. The plant can be eaten by the herbivore and the chemical energy released by cellular respiration used for the animal’s work or the plant can die and decompose. The herbivore exists at the secondary trophic level, any carnivores form the tertiary or quaternary levels while the decomposers form the final trophic level. The amount of available energy is decreased on each trophic level away from the primary producers the autotrophs who did the original photosynthesis. Once the plant (or animal) dies and d
