I notice there was no mention of hydrogen being considered as a clean energy fuel for all sorts of combustion principals ...maybe nr 6 if were considered. Its a no-brainer that with sufficient solar available during the day, electrical energy produced can provide for electrolysis in breaking the water molecule into it's two constituent gases H2 and O.
Maybe this article was written prior to ' blue gas' being considered an alternative.
Solar panels sounds good. But what about the emissions released during their manufacture? When they quit producing, how are they disposed of? The ideal is to have renewable energy such as solar panels to make hydrogen and use the hydrogen to run fuel cell generators. The hydrogen could power fuel cells for transportation, home, and anywhere electrical power is needed.
Nuclear power would be nice if a way to get the waste to a radioactive level that doesn't require humans to safeguard it for 50000 years!
There is a false assumption in the topic--that we can simply change to renewable sources from current types of energy sources without implementing conservation and significant life-style or infrastructure changes, and addressing rampant population growth also.
In discussing solar, we are tempted to ignore solar thermal and only focus on solar electrical. In discussing hydroelectric, we are ignoring the environmental harms that come from damming streams as well as the environmental costs of the dam construction.
We want energy to be available 24/7 on demand. A balanced system has to look at storage of energy for times when the primary sources are limited. Such storage could be batteries (resource limited), pumped hydro storage (very effective in some locations), compressed air, hydrogen generation, and others.
More can be said about the 50+ year lead time needed to upgrade our infrastructure planning to more efficiently use efficient transportation modes, land use, and similar hidden factors.
In my opinion, we will have to go with nuclear energy generation. I do NOT mean thermal nuclear which is most of what we have today, but fast nuclear (Generation IV technology) which utilizes fast neutrons and no moderator. It is better than thermal nuclear by a factor of about 100. Fast nuclear can consume for energy much of the "waste" that thermal nuclear produces. Yes, there is still waste, but much less volume that needs to be stored for much less time. In my opinion, renewable sources of energy will not be able to supply the needs of our society in the future; thus we need something else, and that is fast nuclear.
Re: Top 5 sources of renewable energy
