Undoubtedly, as you may have read or heard before, exploiting renewable energy presents various advantages, ranging from environmental to economical aspects, from ethical to merely technical aspects, along with its challenges of course.
Among all the advantages I will consider those which may have a large-scaled influence in our lives all around the planet. Extraction, efficiency and echo-friendliness are the aspects which I would like to focus on, and we will compare renewable energy and non renewable energy in all three aspects.
Extraction
Or better said no extraction needs at all.
In fact, renewable resources such as wind, solar, tidal power don’t need any extraction process and they are the most common resources on the planet Earth. It means no danger for people, no danger for the environment and no high energy input in order to have them available.
Geothermal and hydro power need special plants and may have environmental impact, but far less than the below mentioned ordinary resources and usually the process is far easier.
Instead, to have our ordinary (or what we call ordinary) energy resources such as oil, coal, uranium, etc., we need to make big efforts to find, extract and move them. Then using special plants they are transformed into useful electric energy. As you can see there are at least three stages before having what we need. In each of the stages a high energy input is required to reach our outcome. The extraction of those “ordinary” energy resources, along with a high energy input, is also a big danger for the people involved in the process, and usually brings devastating consequences for the environment.
Needless to say, at first sight, comparing the extraction aspect of renewable versus “ordinary” energy resources, the advantages are clear, but let’s consider more.
Efficiency
When it comes to considering efficiency the advantages brought from the implementation of systems that use renewable energy resources are amazing. A wind generator, a pretty simple machine, to transform wind into electricity may convert up to 50% of the overall wind energy, a solar panel converts up to 60% (in new generation cells) of the overall solar energy that it collects. Even with a lower efficiency, such as that we have for tidal power plants (up to 30%) it’s not bad, if you consider the total absence of risk for human and environment.
Exploiting less then 0.02% of the overall amount of solar power that daily reaches our planet would be enough to satisfy our (world’s) energy demand instead of ordinary power plants that use coal or oil as a combustible and have the efficiency that doesn’t go over 25%. Not a good performance indeed!
Let’s go further and analyze a bit what happens concerning environment.
Echo-friendliness
When using renewable resources, we don’t need to search for, we don’t need to extract, we don’t even need to transport any combustible across the globe, neither we need any special, polluting and complicated power plant to exploit them.
Tidal, hydro, wind and solar power can be easily found and converted into electricity directly from those basic machines. When no mining or extracting is needed, two things occur: a lot of money is saved and a lot of destruction is avoided. Using simplest power plants, such as those used for tidal, hydro, wind and solar energy one stage is omitted in the energy transformation process (combustion), hence higher energy efficiency is reached and no pollutants at all are emitted, not even 1 gram of CO2.
Not the same for ordinary resources, the plants for mining or extraction entail pollution and waste of energy, as well as transportation does. The power plants needed to burn the combustible are more complex and horribly expensive. In the transformation process 75% of the energy is constantly wasted and as if it wasn’t enough, thousands of tons of CO2 along with a dozen of other poisons are emitted every year from a single power plant.
Extraction needs versus no-extraction needs, with all the consequences, low efficiency versus higher efficiency, pollution versus echo-friendliness are mainly our terms of comparison between non-renewable and renewable sources but, beside those, there are several others.
Yes, things may look a bit shocking, but that’s the truth, this is exactly an overview of how things are going, right now, in our world. Many are the reasons for this situation, but mainly, a widely diffused misinformation as much as a couldn’t-care-less attitude plays a major role in this game.
Those are the enemies we should fight immediately.
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