Renewable energy

energy that is collected from renewable sources

Renewable energy is energy that is collected from renewable resources that are naturally replenished on a human timescale. It includes sources such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves, and geothermal heat. Renewable energy stands in contrast to fossil fuels, which are being used far more quickly than they are being replenished. Although most renewable energy sources are sustainable, some are not. For example, some biomass sources are considered unsustainable at current rates of exploitation.

"I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power!" - Thomas Edison in a conversation shortly before his death. (1931) (A combined heat and power solar installation on a barn roof in Germany.)
"Wind [power cost] has plunged by 80% just in the past 11 or 12 years. . . . Things like wind and solar power really can already out-compete dirtier forms of electricity, and we just need to build more of them quickly; we’re not adding them fast enough." - Daniel Cohan, Rice University. (May 30, 2022) (Wind turbines in Gansu province, China.)

QuotesEdit

Before 2001Edit

2001 to 2010Edit

  • Although photosynthesis typically has an energy conversion efficiency below three percent, it is, together with heat from the sun, the main energy source of all living organisms, and the energy source from which biomass and fossil fuels are derived. Each year the earth receives an energy input from the sun equal to 15,000 times the world's commercial energy consumption and 100 times the world's proven coal, gas and oil reserves.
    • Bernhard Scheffler, quoted by J. Clarke and D. Holt-Biddle in Coming Back to Earth, p. 78 (2002)
  • There is one forecast of which you can already be sure: someday renewable energy will be the only way for people to satisfy their energy needs. Because of the physical, ecological and (therefore) social limits to nuclear and fossil energy use, ultimately nobody will be able to circumvent renewable energy as the solution, even if it turns out to be everybody’s last remaining choice. The question keeping everyone in suspense, however, is whether we shall succeed in making this radical change of energy platforms happen early enough to spare the world irreversible ecological mutilation and political and economic catastrophe.

2011 to 2020Edit

 
"The only way you can get to the very positive {CO2 reduction} scenario is by great innovation. Innovation really does bend the curve." - Bill Gates, global philanthropist and founder of Microsoft. (June 25, 2015)
 
"The next big act belongs to the engineers. Energy transformation for climate safety is our twenty-first-century moonshot." - Jeffrey Sachs, development economist. (Dec. 20, 2018) (Pictured above is Thomas Edison, considered one of the greatest inventors and engineers of all time.)
 
"A carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future." - "Economists’ Statement on Carbon Dividends" signed by more than 3,500 economists. (Jan. 16, 2019) (Signatories included every then-living former chair of the US Federal Reserve, from left to right: Janet Yellen, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Paul Volcker).
 
"Offshore wind is in a category of its own, as the only variable baseload power generation technology." - IEA special report, "Offshore Wind Outlook 2019." (Nov. 2019) (The East Anglia ONE offshore windfarm under construction in the North Sea about 43 kilometers east of the English coast.)
  • More solar energy falls on Earth in one hour than all the energy our civilization consumes in an entire year. If we could harness a tiny fraction of the available solar and wind power, we could supply all our energy needs forever, and without adding any carbon to the atmosphere.
  • Every percentage point increase in homegrown renewable energy makes us that much more energy secure. The progress in electricity is encouraging, but growth is not yet strong enough in renewable heat and transport to meet the government's objectives.
  • If you told me that innovation had been frozen and we just have today's technologies, will the world run the climate change experiment? You bet we will. We will not deny India coal plants; we will run the scary experiment of heating up the atmosphere and seeing what happens. The only reason I'm optimistic about this problem is because of innovation. . . . I want to tilt the odds in our favor by driving innovation at an unnaturally high pace, or more than its current business-as-usual course. I see that as the only thing. I want to call up India someday and say, "Here's a source of energy that is cheaper than your coal plants, and by the way, from a global pollution and local pollution point of view, it's also better."
  • We have long supported a carbon tax as the best policy of those being considered. Replacing the hodge-podge of current, largely ineffective regulations with a revenue-neutral carbon tax would ensure a uniform and predictable cost of carbon across the economy. It would allow market forces to drive solutions. It would maximize transparency, reduce administrative complexity, promote global participation and easily adjust to future developments in our understanding of climate science as well as the policy consequences of these actions.
  • The transition to renewable energy can be greatly accelerated if the world’s governments finally bring the engineers to the fore... I was recently on a panel with three economists and a senior business-sector engineer. After the economists spoke... the engineer spoke succinctly and wisely. “I don’t really understand what you economists were just speaking about, but I do have a suggestion... Tell us engineers the desired ‘specs’ and the timeline, and we’ll get the job done.” This is not bravado.... The next big act belongs to the engineers. Energy transformation for climate safety is our twenty-first-century moonshot.

2021Edit

 
"[W]e can remake our economies, build new businesses, and put millions upon millions of people to work. . . . For too long, the climate conversation has been viewed as [one] of trade-offs: the climate or the economy. No longer." - US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, addressing the 2021 Leaders Summit on Climate. (Apr. 23, 2021)
 
"Deploying today’s renewables and improving transmission couldn’t be more important. [And] even as we deploy, deploy, deploy solar and wind, the world is going to need some new clean electricity inventions too." - Bill Gates, from his book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. (Feb. 16, 2021)
 
"We can get real on coal, cars, cash and trees. . . . [W]e cannot and will not succeed by government spending alone. . . . [Let us] in the next days . . . not only continue with . . . a green industrial revolution, [but let] us also do enough to save our planet and our way of life." - UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, welcoming the COP representatives to Glasgow. (Nov. 1, 2021)
 
"[W]ithin the growing [climate] catastrophe, I believe there’s an incredible opportunity . . . . We have the ability to invest in ourselves and build an equitable clean-energy future and in the process create millions of good-paying jobs [while we] create an environment that raises the standard of living around the world." - US President Joe Biden, addressing the COP26 international climate conference. (Nov. 1, 2021)
 
"India will take its non-fossil energy capacity to 500 gigawatts by 2030, [and] India will meet 50 percent of its energy requirements from renewable energy by 2030." - Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India since 2014, addressing the COP26 international climate conference. (Nov. 2, 2021)

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (book)Edit

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. Book by Bill Gates. Published by Alfred A. Knopf on February 16, 2021. ISBN 9780385546133 (hardcover), ISBN 9780385546140 (e-book).
Main Wikiquote page for How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
Wikipedia page for How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

  • Deploying today’s renewables and improving transmission couldn’t be more important. . . . Unless we use large amounts of nuclear energy . . . every path to zero [net emissions] in the United States will require us to install as much wind and solar power as we can build and find room for. It’s hard to say exactly how much of America’s electricity will come from renewables in the end, but what we do know is that between now and 2050 we have to build them much faster - on the order of 5 to 10 times faster - than we’re doing right now. And remember that most countries aren’t as lucky as the United States when it comes to solar and wind resources. The fact that we can hope to generate a large percentage of our power from renewables is the exception rather than the rule. That’s why, even as we deploy, deploy, deploy solar and wind, the world is going to need some new clean electricity inventions too.
  • [I]t's . . . possible that some innovation will come along and make [other energy storage] ideas obsolete, the way the personal computer came along and more or less made the typewriter unnecessary. Cheap hydrogen could do that for storing electricity. . . . We could use electricity from a solar or wind farm to create hydrogen, store the hydrogen as a compressed gas or in another form, and then put it in a fuel cell to generate electricity on demand. [This] would solve the location problem; . . . although you can't ship sunlight in a railcar, you can turn it into fuel first and then ship it any way you like.

COP26 Climate Conference in Scotland, UKEdit

26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (or "COP26"), held in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom from October 31st to November 13th, 2021. (The quotes below are listed in the order used in the UNFCCC's "COP 26 Speeches and statements" webpage. The quotes are from the speeches as delivered; some of the English language speeches deviate slightly from the submitted speech transcripts.)

2022 and laterEdit

 
[A] decarbonisation strategy [has been] accepted by those determined to stabilise the climate. Make the power on electric grids emissions-free, cheap and copious. Start electrifying all processes that now require fossil fuels . . . where electrification is clearly possible. It does not deliver everything that is needed. But it delivers a lot. - Vijay Vaitheeswaran, writing as climate innovation editor at The Economist. (June 25, 2022)
 
"If you want to [get to 100% renewable energy], you're going to have to solve that problem of . . . long-term storage for the grid . . . . [Y]ou could do that with gravity storage [or] with a chemical energy carrier [like] hydrogen or ammonia or another chemical energy medium which is yet to be discovered." - George Crabtree, Director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research at Argonne National Laboratory. (Nov. 17, 2022)
  • [T]he solution has to be real economy government regulations to ban or to make higher [the] cost of the brown and polluting industries. That said, there are parts of finance which are longer-term and [evaluate] climate risks . . . and these are asset owners, the pension funds, the wealth funds and the insurance companies who are not so transactional [and] they’re not [as] interested in a deal to be done today. And they are in fact often mandated by their governments to take into account climate risk. So, I think those players will step up in this instance [turmoil in energy markets following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine] and [now who might be] investing for [an electricity generation project with a] 10-year horizon which you have to do with gas they will [say], "Let’s do it with renewables." And we’ve seen movements like that in the UK, where they’re pivoting towards onshore wind, which before the invasion was politically unviable because of the NIMBY factor. . . . [T]he pension funds and the actual asset owners . . . have a longer term of perspective. And they are actually driving the issue to their commercial managers who have to service them and they’re saying, "Look, we want you to act on climate change," and that's a huge driver.

Confronting Climate Gridlock (book)Edit

Confronting Climate Gridlock: How Diplomacy, Technology, and Policy Can Unlock a Clean Energy Future. Book by Daniel S. Cohan. Published by Yale University Press on March 29, 2022. ISBN 9780300251678 (hardcover).
(All page references below are to the hardcover version of the book).

US Inflation Reduction ActEdit

  • The [provisions of the proposed Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, including] expansion of the wind and solar credits, the exciting expansion, or creation, of additional credits in green hydrogen, the inclusion of hydrogen cars in electric car credits, the extension of the electric car credits - all those things are good [but they're] not enough. The question now is, what do we do next?
  • The Inflation Reduction Act calls for spending less than $500 billion over a decade, compared with the American Rescue Plan’s $1.9 trillion in a single year . . . . But if the spending isn’t very large, how can it have such a big impact? The answer is that right now we’re sitting on a sort of cusp. Renewable energy technology has made revolutionary progress, and renewables are already cheaper in many areas than fossil fuels. A moderate push from public policy is all that it will take to transition to a much greener economy. And the Inflation Reduction Act will provide that push.

COP27 Climate Conference in EgyptEdit

27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (or "COP27"), held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt from November 6th to 18th, 2022

See alsoEdit

Wikipedia Articles)

External linksEdit

 
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