Renewable energy

Renewable energy comes from resources that can be renewed in a reasonable amount of time and not from fossil fuels, which will run out. Renewable energy includes wind power, solar power, hydropower, biomass, biofuel and geothermal energy. I have already written detailed blog posts about wind power and biofuel so this is just a fairly quick post to summarize the remaining alternative energies that exist for humanity to use instead of crude oil.

According to renewable global status report, 19% of the global energy consumption in 2014 already came from renewable energy and 22% of all our electricity was generated from energy produced by renewable energy sources (Sawin, 2014). Worldwide investments in renewable energy were $214 billion in 2013 with particular interest in renewable energy shown by USA and China (Sawin, 2014). The main advantage of renewable energy is that production of energy this way is much more environmentally friendly and causes less GHGs emissions in comparison to the conventional crude oil recovery methods. Furthermore renewable energy is not geographically constrained unlike oil, deposits of which are only found in particular countries on Earth. Thus each country can generate one type or another of renewable energy making it independent of the volatile oil prices, economically more stable and secure as well as providing energy securities regardless of geopolitics conflicts occurring elsewhere in the world and making the country “green”.

Below there is a video of how renewable energy is produced by all the methods that I have not discussed in details however I feel like a little summary of each method is nevertheless required in this post. Firstly solar power produces energy by converting the thermal energy emitted by the sun and well as the light energy into electricity. This is mainly done using solar panels. Hydropower uses the kinetic energy produced by flowing rivers and oceans on our planet to convert it to electricity. This is done using dams and it is possible because water is much more dense than air thus any flowing body of it produces kinetic energy that can be converted and other types of energy making it more useful for humans. Biomass is the biological material that one gets from currently living or recently living organisms on our planet via either combustion thus converting biomass to thermal energy or by converting it to different forms of biofuels by biochemical processes. Finally geothermal energy uses the fact that the Earth’s core is much warmer than the surface and regardless of the season or atmospheric temperatures, the temperature below the surface is always warm. This is partially due to the radioactive decay of the minerals found below the Earth’s surface that release a lot of heat during the decay. Thermal energy derived from the decay can also be converted into electricity and other useful energies for the society.

Renewable energy has seen increased popularity in our society especially as oil prices are rising and crude oil is running out. Many more investments and research have been done into different types of renewable energy. Even the developing countries and emerging economies are now starting to explore the field of alternative energies treating it as long-term investments into the future. Below there is an example of an advert from a brochure in South Africa promoting renewable energy.

Figure 1.

Source. South African brochure advert promoting renewable energy.