How to Use potential energy in a Sentence
potential energy
noun-
More weight means more potential energy to push the car down the slope.
—Bradley Ford, Popular Mechanics, 12 Jan. 2023
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Gasoline, for its many flaws, contains an enormous amount of potential energy in a very small amount of mass.
—Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, 20 May 2021
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The vast potential energy of the ocean and the prospect of diminishing up-front costs appeals to investors with longer-term timelines.
—Phil Rosen, Fortune, 28 Sep. 2021
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This energy is transferred to you in the form of potential energy.
—Randall Munroe, Time, 12 Sep. 2019
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As October drew to a close, the White House saw another potential energy flash point on the horizon.
—Kevin Crowley, Jennifer A. Dlouhy and Ari Natter, Anchorage Daily News, 6 Nov. 2022
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Well, there are a tremendous number of people who need help, and there's a tremendous amount of potential energy in the idea of this group of people getting back together.
—Dan Snierson, EW.com, 1 May 2020
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Takeoff: The potential energy in the bent pole is transferred back to the athlete’s body as kinetic energy.
—Popular Mechanics Editors, Popular Mechanics, 25 July 2021
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The higher their vibe, meaning the more they are naturally aligned with and energized by the role they have been assigned, the more potential energy is released.
—Tabitha Scott, Forbes, 9 Aug. 2022
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Both possess the same mass and potential energy, but basic intuition suggests that large numbers of foam balls will not cause the same damage to you as one piano.
—Scientific American, 13 Oct. 2021
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That energy change is the change in electric potential energy.
—Rhett Allain, Wired, 23 Jan. 2021
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From ions to waves, there's a lot of potential energy in the water that covers 70 percent of the planet, and these hydrophobic surfaces could help tap into that energy.
—David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 4 Oct. 2018
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The European Union has also been embracing a potential energy shortage as Russia threatens to cut off oil and gas supplies to the West.
—Brian Bushard, Forbes, 9 Aug. 2022
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There’s so much potential energy lying dormant there, and last night’s awards ceremony teaches us that the voice always speaks more clearly than the body.
—Josephine Livingstone, New Republic, 8 Jan. 2018
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One of the nation’s top oil and gas producing states, California, is delaying the closure of gas plants to cope with a potential energy crunch this summer.
—Kate Aronoff, The New Republic, 1 July 2022
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Warm water Hurricanes feed off of warm water at the surface of the ocean—the greater the temperature difference between the surface and the mid-levels of the atmosphere, the more potential energy a storm has.
—Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 7 Sep. 2017
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There will be two types of energy here—the gravitational potential energy (U) that depends on the height and the kinetic energy (K) that depends on the speed.
—Rhett Allain, Wired, 13 Aug. 2021
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China and India have become major customers, and the crop now is being eyed as a potential energy source for power plants, ships and airplanes, which would create even more demand.
—Margie Mason and Robin McDowell, chicagotribune.com, 21 Nov. 2020
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The measure of this is called CAPE (convective available potential energy).
—Jeff Halverson, Washington Post, 10 May 2018
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Two of the nation’s largest grid operators issued alerts about potential energy shortages for that reason this week.
—Justine Calma, The Verge, 28 July 2023
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As the coin moves down the bowl, the gravitational potential energy will decrease, resulting in an increase in kinetic energy (which depends on the speed of the coin).
—Rhett Allain, Wired, 21 Oct. 2020
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The Energy Vault is based on the science that most of us learned in Middle School – potential energy versus kinetic energy.
—James Conca, Forbes, 27 Jan. 2022
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Inflation is a simple idea: imagine that the universe begins in a tiny patch of space dominated by the potential energy of some scalar field, a kind of super-dense dark energy.
—Sean Carroll, Discover Magazine, 21 Oct. 2011
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What instead pulsates with life is the sandbox itself: the potential energy of this playground, with its unexplored easter eggs yet to be discovered.
—Sonia Saraiya, HWD, 20 Apr. 2018
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The measure of this fuel, known as convective available potential energy (CAPE), could exceed 2,000, a large number for our region.
—Jason Samenow, Washington Post, 9 May 2018
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There might be kinetic energy if the whole system is moving, and there might be potential energy too (the energy stored in a system as a result of its position).
—Popular Mechanics, 17 Mar. 2023
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By spinning the electric motor backward, the car will be able to turn the kinetic energy of braking into potential energy that’s stored in something like a flywheel or a small battery.
—Sean O'Kane, The Verge, 1 Aug. 2019
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Storing potential energy – within chemical or nuclear bonds or by virtue of gravity and location in the case of dams – is the old-fashioned way of doing things.
—Erik Kobayashi-Solomon, Forbes, 18 Aug. 2022
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The elastic potential energy that was stored in the stick is transformed into movement, called kinetic energy.
—Scientific American, 12 Dec. 2019
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Yet the issue of initial conditions remained: What was the source of the minuscule patch that allegedly ballooned into our cosmos, and of the potential energy that inflated it?
—Wired, 16 June 2019
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With turkeys, the waddle may act as a pendulum that recovers some of the potential energy (from the change in position of its center of mass) and uses that for kinetic energy to propel it forward.
—Paul M. Sutter, Discover Magazine, 21 Nov. 2023
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'potential energy.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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