Renewable Energy’s Bright Future: Green Energy’s Pros and Cons

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Renewable Energy’s Bright Future: Green Energy’s Pros and Cons

 

Renewable Energy’s Bright Future: Green Energy’s Pros and Cons

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Recent international focus on safe energy underscores the need for reevaluating all energy alternatives, particularly those that are clean and renewable. Because although the global economy is coming out of a recent recession, oil prices are climbing and the demand for alternative renewable sources is consistently growing. Indeed, the alternative energy market is one of the few markets that has seen substantial growth during the recent recession of the last two years. One thing is clear; the need for more efficient use of electricity with the integration of renewable energy sources is present.

Smart Grid and the Integration of Renewable Energy Sources

The Smart Grid is a Department of Energy (DOE) supported project that involves an integrated system of mixed distributed resources to increase the penetration of renewable energy – such as hydro, wind, solar, wind and geothermal, while delivering improved efficiency and reliability. These and other distributed resources will be fully integrated into the new smart, electrical grid.

 

What is Renewable Energy?

Renewable energy sources are sources of energy that are constantly replenished. These include energy from water, wind, the sun, geothermal sources, and biomass sources such as energy crops. In comparison, fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas are non-renewable. Once a deposit of these fuels is depleted it cannot be replenished – a replacement source must be found instead. In the United States, both renewable and non-renewable energy sources are used to generate electricity, power vehicles, and provide heating, cooling, and light. While renewable energy is generally more expensive than conventionally produced supplies, alternative power helps to reduce pollution and to conserve fossil fuels. “People sometimes get caught up in cost-effectiveness,” said Paul Torcellini, a senior engineer at the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. “But it can be a question of values and what we spend our money on.”

For comparison purposes, we will explore a few of the different sources of renewable energy:

Hydropower

WHAT IT IS:

Hydropower refers to the use of water to generate electricity. Water is the most common renewable source of energy in the United States today. Hydroelectric power doesn’t necessarily require a large dam – some hydroelectric power plants just use a small canal to channel the river water through a turbine. Other uses of hydropower include water-cooled chiller and power systems.

PROS:

Hydropower is a renewable and non-polluting energy source without any greenhouse gas discharge and no toxic waste production.

CONS:

Where dams are built in order to utilize hydropower, the cost can be substantial. Also, the unnatural block in the river’s system disturbs natural fish migratory and spawning patterns.

THE FUTURE:

Hydropower energy sources should experience strong development in the coming decades because of their non-polluting nature and significant unexploited potential.

Wind Power

WHAT IT IS:

Wind power refers to the use of modern wind turbines that are used to generate electricity, either for individual use or for contribution to a utility power grid. The power in wind increases rapidly with its speed, which means that locating windmills in areas of strong winds is critical. The strongest winds in the United States tend to be in Alaska, the western United States, and the Appalachians. Wind power currently supplies about 1% of United States electricity needs, but capacity is expanding rapidly.

PROS:

Wind power is plentiful, renewable and relatively affordable. Wind power does not produce emissions.

CONS:

Wind power produces power intermittently.

THE FUTURE:

Renewable energy companies are producing technology that is becoming more attractive and although this is to be expected with climbing oil prices, the demand for alternative energy was climbing even two years ago when oil prices were low. In 2008, oil prices were lower than they are today, yet 2008 was a market year for wind energy installation. One out of two wind turbines in the United States are GE built. The painful recession that occurred in the last few years did not slow the growth of alternative renewable energy. Wind energy business is taking off with more wind energy installed in 2008 than had been installed in the previous twenty years.

Solar Power

WHAT IT IS:

Solar power refers to the use of the sun’s energy to provide heat, light, hot water, electricity, and even cooling, for homes, businesses, and industry. Despite sunlight’s significant potential for supplying energy, solar power provides less than 1% of U.S. energy needs. This percentage is expected to increase with the development of new and more efficient solar technologies.

PROS:

Solar power gives off no pollution, however, during the manufacturing, transportation and installation of these goods there is pollution produced.

CONS:

A big drawback of solar power is the large investment needed in order to purchase solar cells. Currently, prices of highly efficient solar cells can be above 00, and some applications may need more than one. This makes the initial installation of solar panels very expensive. Homeowners have been reluctant to embrace solar panel installations on their homes because the panels can be aesthetically unpleasing and because the technology may require puncturing an existing roof and bolting on metal supports, which can void the roof’s warranty.

THE FUTURE:

Solar panel roof tiles consist of grids of raised black cells that, up until now, have usually come in the form of large clunky rectangular panels that either stand alone, or must be bolted onto a roof. The market potential for aesthetically appealing solar panels that can be integrated into the roof of one’s house is great. Read more at Sunslates (external link).

Geothermal Power

WHAT IT IS:

Geothermal power refers to the use of natural sources of heat inside the Earth to produce heat or electricity. Currently, most geothermal power is generated using steam or hot water from underground. Geothermal power generation produces few emissions and the power source is continuously available.

PROS:

Geothermal power is efficient and cost effective. This power source leads to savings. Additionally, this is around 70% cheaper than heating a home using electric heating, oil or liquefied petroleum gas.

CONS:

Geothermal power is not a do-it-yourself project because of the technical knowledge and machinery required for design and installation. The design alone may already be complicated to do and the pipe connection process requires proper training and the right tools.

THE FUTURE:

For individual household applications, geothermal heat pumps pass air through a pipe below ground that stays a constant 50 to 60 degrees, heating in the winter and cooling in the summer, saving tremendous amounts on utility costs in the process. Although geothermal stocks lost significant value during the recent recession, it is anticipated that Federal incentives will lure private capital to the sector, allowing financing to go through for new projects.

Renewable, Green Energy: Future Growth

Assumptions about world oil prices are not the only important factor that underscores the need for renewable energy use and consolidation. It is projected that by the year 2030, the demand for electricity in the United States will jump by 30%. And with projected oil prices, as well as concern about the environmental impacts of fossil fuel use and strong government incentives for increasing the use of renewable energy, the prospects for renewable energy use will likely increase worldwide.

 

 

The Future Of Wind Energy

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The Future Of Wind Energy

 

 

 

If you’re one of those people who every winter puts out 10,000 holiday lights or every summer keeps the air conditioning cold enough to make frozen treats on the kitchen counter – or whether you’re like everyone else who simply likes the modern convenience of electrical – then you should care about how we will generate electricity in the future.
We are in no danger of running out of coal, the primary fuel source for electricity generation in the US and many other parts of the world. And we could have as many new glowing nuclear power plants as we want. But the reality is that the pollution and safety impacts of these electricity-generating technologies forecast their necessary demise:
1) The problems with coal-fired power plants include sulfur (acid rain) and mercury pollution; coal-fired power plants are the biggest source of greenhouse gases in the world; and coal mining scars land and people alike.
2) Nuclear power plants are very clean in terms of emissions of typical pollutants, including carbon dioxide (the principal greenhouse gas), but the potential for accidents and terrorist strikes has most people doubting the wisdom of more nuclear power. And let’s not forget that we still don’t know what to do with the tons of long-term radioactive waste nuclear power plants produce.
So what does the future look like for electricity generation? We must start making major strides towards cleaner technologies like wind, solar, wave, and biomass. Today we talk about wind energy in an article that was adapted from materials made available by Lester Brown and the Earth Policy Institute.
People have been harnessing the power of the wind for centuries. The concept of wind energy is simple: the wind pushes against angled blades, causing them to move (much like the sail on a boat); the blades are attached to a hub and cause it to turn, which in turn can drive other components.
In olden days – back when wind-powered devices were called windmills – the turning motion of the hub was transferred to mechanical devices such as grist mills or groundwater pumps. graphic of wind turbines In a modern wind turbine, the hub drives an electrical generator and the output is electricity.
The modern wind turbine has come a long way in terms of sophistication, and the designs of today’s wind turbines are elegant and very efficient compared to wind turbines from even a decade or two ago. Designers have also solved some problems associated with early wind turbines, such as birds dying by flying into them. Additional advancements have been made in siting technology – wind turbines can also be sited off-shore now.
With wind-generated electricity, the principal production cost is the capital outlay for initial construction. Since wind is a free fuel, the only ongoing cost is for maintenance. Given the recent volatility of natural gas prices, the stability graph of wind power cost; shows cost has come down from 38 cents per kilowatt hour in 1982 to 4 cents per kilowatt hour in 2002 of wind power prices is particularly appealing. With the possibility of even higher costs of natural gas in the future, natural gas-fired plants may be used increasingly as backup for wind-generated electricity.
When the wind industry first began to develop in California in the early 1980s, wind-generated electricity cost 38 cents per kilowatt-hour. Since then it has dropped to 4 cents or less in prime wind sites. And some long-term supply contracts have been signed for 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. By 2020, many European wind farms will be generating electricity at 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, making it cheaper than all other sources of electricity.
Wind-generating capacity worldwide is growing at over 30% per year and has jumped from less than 5,000 megawatts in 1995 to 39,000 megawatts in 2003 – an increase of nearly eight-fold. The fossil fuel with the highest growth rate – natural gas – grew at just over 2% annually during the same period. Oil grew at less than 2% annually, and coal at less than 1%. Nuclear generating capacity expanded by 2% annually.
Wind is appealing for several reasons. It is abundant, cheap, inexhaustible, widely distributed, clean, and climate-benign – a set of attributes that no other energy source can match. When the US Department of Energy (DOE) released its first wind resource inventory in 1991, it pointed out that three wind-rich states – North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas – had enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy all of the nation’s electricity needs. Those who had previously thought of wind as a marginal potential source of energy obviously were surprised by this finding.
In retrospect, we now know that the 1991 data was a gross underestimate of the potential of this renewable energy source, because it was based on the technologies available in 1991. Advances in wind turbine design since then have enabled turbines to operate at lower wind speeds, to convert wind into electricity more efficiently, and to harness a much larger wind regime. Such advancement have perhaps tripled the amount of harvestable wind. Thus, while the DOE could say in 1991 that North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas had enough wind-energy potential to supply all national ELECTRICITY needs, we may now be able to say that they have enough harnessable wind energy to supply all national ENERGY needs. (See sidebar for more information.)
Once we get cheap electricity from wind, we have the option of electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen, which provides a way of both storing and efficiently transporting wind energy. At night, when the demand for electricity drops, the hydrogen generators can be turned on to build up reserves.
Once in storage, hydrogen can be used to fuel power plants, in much the same way that natural gas is used. This hydrogen can be used either as a backup for wind power or as an alternative to natural gas, especially if rising prices make natural gas prohibitively costly for electricity generation.
Hydrogen is also the fuel of choice for the fuel-cell engines that automakers worldwide are working on for our everyday vehicles. While hydrogen-powered vehicles may still seem far off in the future, if push comes to shove on the climate front – i.e. once it becomes more obvious that we must stop burning so much oil and pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere – cars with gasoline-burning internal combustion engines could be converted to hydrogen.
Europe is leading the world into the age of wind energy, spurred in part by concerns about global warming. The record heat wave in Europe in August 2003 that scorched crops and claimed 35,000 lives has accelerated the replacement of climate-disrupting coal with clean energy sources.
The European Wind Energy Association projects that Europe’s wind-based electricity-generating capacity will nearly triple from 2003 to 2010. By 2020, wind-generated electricity is projected to satisfy graph of wind power capacity by country; shows a steady upward trend for all countries, with Germany leading, followed by Spain and the U S, then Denmark and India the residential needs of 195 million Europeans – half of the region’s population.
After developing most of its existing 28,400 megawatts of capacity on land, Europe is now tapping offshore wind resources as well. A 2004 assessment of Europe’s offshore wind-energy potential concluded that if Europe moves more aggressively to develop its vast offshore resources, wind could be supplying all of the region’s residential electricity by 2020.
Many countries in Europe are pushing hard to bring in more wind power. Here are a few examples.
1) The United Kingdom is requiring an investment of over billion in off-shore wind farms that should satisfy the residential electricity needs of 10 million of the country’s 60 million people.
2) Tiny Denmark, which led Europe into the wind era with the development of its own wind resources, now gets an impressive 20 percent of its electricity from wind.
3) Germany overtook the United States in terms of wind-based generating capacity in 1997. Now Spain is close to overtaking the United States as well.
Europe’s leadership on wind energy has given it a major economic bonus: nine of the world’s ten leading wind turbine manufacturers are in three countries – enmark, Germany, and Spain. These happen to be the three countries that have had the strongest and most stable market incentives for developing wind energy.
In the US, wind power has grown 26% per year on average over the last 5 years, but the United States is lagging in the development of wind energy. This is not because we can’t compete technologically with Europe in manufacturing wind turbines, but because of a lack of leadership in Washington. The wind production tax credit of 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, which was adopted in 1992 to establish parity with fossil-fuel subsidies, has been permitted to lapse three times in the last five years, most recently at the end of 2003 when Congress failed to pass a new energy bill. Such uncertainties disrupt planning throughout the wind power industry.
The United States, with its advanced technology and wealth of wind resources, should be a leader in this field, but unfortunately it continues picture of wind farm to rely heavily on coal – a nineteenth century energy source – for much of its electricity at a time when European countries are replacing coal power with wind power.
Europe is not only leading the world into the wind age, it is also leading the world into the post-fossil fuel age – the age of renewable energy and climate stabilization. By demonstrating the potential for harnessing the energy in wind, Europe is unveiling the new energy economy for the rest of the world.

Lester Brown is founder and president of Earth Policy Institute. He has been described by the Washington Post as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” and as “the guru of the global environmental movement” by The Telegraph of Calcutta. His most recent book is Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.
One final note about wind power. There are naysayers out there who claim that we would have to blanket the country with “wind-meels” to replace all our coal and nuclear plants. Don’t believe it. Remember that on a wind farm, the “footprint” of the operation – the turbine base plus the service roads – occupies only 5% of the land area. That makes wind power a perfect partner with open-space operations like farming and ranching.
And oh, by the way, our current electricity-generating technologies are blanketing the country with pollution!

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Greener Energy Online Supports Renewable Energy Sources. View many articles related to alternative residential home energy systems here at greenerenergyonline.com.

 

About the Author:

James Nash is a climate scientist with Greatest Planet (www.greatestplanet.org). Greatest Planet is a non-profit environmental organization specialising in carbon offset investments.

James Nash is solely responsible for the contents of this article.

 

Alternative energy is the way of the future

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Alternative energy is the way of the future

 

Alternative energy is derived from natural, renewable resources, such as wind, solar and water. Not to be confused with the fact that alternative Power the only thing that is lost at the end of the global warming, global leadership, eliminates the dependency on foreign energy will create millions of jobs (Yes, also in the band of rust) and keep our lives by means of the twenty-first century.

Adour Global alternative energy indexes only businesses that are mainly in the field of alternative energy and companies that alternative Power edge to their main business is excluded.The use of alternative energy is no longer a mystery in our daily requirement for power. discover what alternative energy is and how it can help to save money and the environment.

but the true potential of this title unsaid.Solar has gone from $ 254 per watt in the 1950s to about $ 4 today. It suggests that people go to old methods of extracting energy and consumption in exchange for alleged cleaning methods such as wind, water, solar, nuclear, giant batteries, methane gas, maize (corn) oil, etc..

The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) is the national trade association of solar energy
Power plants using renewable and sustainable energy sources are not burning fuels in the production of electricity, so a reduction in the emission atmosphere-. some people see of alternative energy as a joke, and I think in particular wind power generation is also occasionally.

Windmills have been proposed for power now obtained from natural gas. This type of energy derive their power constantly flowing natural energy and contain examples of hydropower, solar energy and geothermal energy.

Renewable means in such a way that its existence is not permanent. Renewable energy sources, such as biomass, small hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal power and photovoltaic systems, can give you a wider free control. The first of these is the huge investment and federal law amendments which are necessary for the smart grid of renewable energy.

While we are making progress in finding new and renewable energy, we are more than halfway to our goal to move away from our dependence on the oil industry.

Wind energy is long as weak and, thanks to the location driven, impractical has been cancelled. Wind Turbines have a role in the new generation sustainable providers.Now it is important to point out that tidal, wave, solar energy and wind energy requires almost no provisional energy, as opposed to coal, oil, gas, biomass, hydrogen and all the others.”Alternative” energy sources wind, solar, water are all good, but they do not seem to confirm our addictive nature.

Global warming is a big factor in the rise of the alternative Power. alternative energy is not only cost effective and necessary for the foreign policy is also required for the domestic policy, with a view to promoting a sustainable environment and in order to prevent global warming and global catastrophe that global warming is advanced.

Global warming or not, we still need to clean this wreck of a planet. read more about existing alternative energy technologies as good as what the future energy sources can help you to efficiently power from your home or business. Living off the grid is a term used to describe people who are looking for alternative sources of energy to install and do not bind to the traditional electric power stations.

Alternative energy is the way of the future. alternative power is a future idea whose time is over.

ted -

About the Author:

The Author have been writing articles for years. You can check out his latest website: http://alternativeenergyreport.blogspot.com – Where you can learn about Alternative Energy…And find articles on renewable energy

 

No Nukes, No Problem? Germany’s Race for a Renewable Future

Tweet During the last several years, there has been talk of a global “renaissance of nuclear energy”. That was yesterday. Today, the tragic disaster in Fukushima, Japan, has raised worrying questions about the safety standards of existing nuclear power plants.
Green Power News – RenewableEnergyWorld.com

Is nuclear power fair for future generations? Realities of nuclear power production

TweetThe recent nuclear accident in Fukushima Daiichi in Japan has brought the nuclear debate to the forefront of controversy. While Japan is trying to avert further disaster, many nations are reconsidering the future of nuclear power in their regions. A new study reflects on the various possible nuclear power production methods from an ethical perspective: If we intend to continue with nuclear power production, which technology is most morally desirable?
ScienceDaily: Renewable Energy News

Masdar is just a showcase – existing cities must forge their own green future | Martin Wright

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The sci-fi sparkle of Masdar City is impressive, but sustainability will come from less flashy changes to our own home towns

So, Masdar, which was planned to be the world’s first zero-carbon city, is experiencing a few teething troubles and, as John Vidal has reported, its ambitions have been dramatically cut back.

We’ve been here before. Masdar is the latest in a long line of brave new worlds that appear to promise the earth and then in practice deliver rather less. Remember Dongtan? That vast eco-metropolis that was supposed to rise up from the marshlands outside Shanghai? Nearly a decade on, the marshes still lie empty, the project mired in local politics. Or think of the huge hopes invested in Britain’s new towns after the war; or the tower blocks that were going to sweep away the slums with bright, airy living. Grand designs often go awry.

But talk of Masdar as a failure is premature. Sure, the ambition may have been scaled down – along with virtually every other project under the sun in these cash-crunched times. And some of the more fanciful features – such as the magnetic pilotless cars – have been dropped in favour of a more banal approach.

But this is still a scheme with some scale. If there are no more cutbacks, by 2021 Masdar will be a desert city of 40,000 powered entirely by renewables. It will have proved that it’s possible to slash water consumption – arguably even more important than cutting energy – and eliminate waste almost entirely. All of which is no mean achievement in a region whose main urban claim to fame – Dubai – is the living epitome of an unsustainable future. By then, Masdar shouldn’t be alone. On China’s Pacific coast, the Tianjin eco-city development is promising green living powered by solar and geothermal, with nine out of 10 journeys to be made by foot, bike or public transport.

But if we see these new developments as a model for the green cities of the future, it will be us who have failed, even if they’ve been a (qualified) success. Why? Because by 2040, two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in urban areas, and all but a tiny fraction of these will be in today’s vast conglomerations.

So the green city of the future already has a name: it’s called Mumbai or London, New York or Lagos. And if we can’t transform our existing urban areas into something approaching sustainability, then we are, frankly, stuffed. These don’t have the luxury of starting from scratch – let alone doing so with a budget funded by years of oil revenue.

But there is a huge amount that can be done. A lot of this consists of boring old efficiency techniques, from lagging lofts to reusing greywater. These can save far more resources than can ever be generated by covering roofs in solar PV – sensible though that is. But there could be shiny new tech too – for example, laser-guided “shoals” of driverless travel pods, running on a fraction of the power used by today’s electric vehicles, could replace the noisy chaos of traffic jammed streets.

In this context, the real value of Masdar is as a showcaseand laboratory for the innovations that will help shape our urban future: from radical new public transit systems to smart mini-grids. But some of the most innovative changes will be in attitudes and behaviour, rather than gizmos. Forum for the Future’s report Megacities on the Move highlights the need for radical shifts in ideas of ownership – of cars, for example. Already, schemes like Whipcar – which allow members to borrow neighbours’ cars as and when needed – are emerging.

But why drive at all, if everything you need is in walking or cycling distance? Rather than building endless Masdars, we could reconfigure existing cities around local hubs, avoiding the need for constant crosstown traffic. Community-owned energy and food schemes could go a long way towards meeting local needs too. In Britain, the Transition Towns movement – about as far away from oil-rich dream metropolises as you can get – is buzzing with ideas like these.

The challenge may be enormous, but so are the possibilities. So let’s enjoy the sci-fi sparkle of Masdar by all means. But be prepared to get down and dirty to transform the mean streets of our home towns too.

Environment: Renewable energy | guardian.co.uk

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