Hi, welcome to my blog on renewable energy. In our modern world, it is hard to escape from the looming pressure of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Newspapers and websites are full of reminders that we are consuming to excess, and causing global changes to our planet. Fossil fuels are seen as the weapon of destruction, pumping harmful greenhouse gases into our ever warming planet, and are widely regarded as, in Douglas Adams’ words, A bad move. Renewable energy on the other hand seemingly offers a beacon of hope in this world of destruction. Renewable energy sources, as the name implies, are highly sustainable over extremely long periods of time, and don’t rely on the burning of fossil fuels.
Great! Let’s swap to renewables then!
Not so fast.
You see, renewable energy is much better for the environment, but it relies on typically high commitments by governments to actually produce a significant portion of the country’s energy mix through renewables. This leads to the rather depressing current proportion of energy produced renewably.
This is where opinion and fact start to blur. A range of different actors, from oil firms to green movements, each have a stake in the renewable sector. This produces a lot of bias concerning public information. Greenpeace’s website offers an example of this:
Whilst the statistics presented are all true, they are not the entire truth. The 6 myths of renewable energy are posed as the main issues of changing our energy source. This is a drastic understatement. Whilst an effective marketing campaign, solving socio-economic issues by focusing on single examples e.g. Wind power being cost effective in India, does not mean the issues no longer exist. Moreover, it demonstrates an oversight of the campaign to expect that every country is homogenous and will respond to renewable energy in the exact same way.
This is not to say Greenpeace are incorrect, or that they should abandon this marketing. However, it does start to highlight fact selection within the renewable sphere. Greenpeace partially acknowledge this with ‘Myth 6: Greenpeace wants to turn off all coal and nuclear power plants today’. This is a recognition of the gravity of the task to produce all of our energy renewably and offers a (albeit oversimplified again) 3 step method of switching to renewables.
In this increasingly confusing topic, the aim of this blog is to take a more balanced and complete look at how viable renewable energy is going into the future. I intend to focus on the socio-economic issues that need to be overcome in order for renewables to be feasible, which will be achieved by looking at specific renewable energy sources and specific countries and their respective merits and drawbacks. This aims to then produce a detailed overview of which energy sources can be used, and in which different contexts they are best applied.
Great blog
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