Coal-fired Power Plant
Tremendous amounts of electric power are generated by coal-fired power plants such as this one in China, but an even larger amount of power goes into heat transfer to the surroundings. The large cooling towers here are needed to transfer heat as rapidly as it is produced. The transfer of heat is not unique to coal plants but is an unavoidable consequence of generating electric power from any fuel—nuclear, coal, oil, natural gas, or the like.
Source
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"Free High School Science Texts Project, The Atom: Energy Quantisation and Electron Configuration. November 4, 2012."
http://cnx.org/content/m42152/latest/
OpenStax CNX
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