Pros and Cons of Renewable Energy

Some of the short videos on the pros and cons of renewable energy that I made back in 2012 have gotten a decent number of views; the one below has over 166K.  Unfortunately, most of these people aren’t exactly the audience I was hoping to target, i.e., fairly well informed people with an active interest in the business side of renewables.

The latest comment provides a fabulous example: Solar power is not renewable. It cannot be renewed or replenished by any means……….. so stop calling it “renewable.” It is “intermittent” ……. and that describes it as accurately as any term that can be applied.

Actually, if you want to get philosophical about it, the guy is right.  The sun has been shining on Earth for 4.5 billion years, and it will continue to do so for another 5 billion or so, at which point it will run out of fuel (hydrogen), collapse on itself, then, from the heat generated from the implosion, explode into space, vaporizing the Earth. There truly is nothing we can do about that. For those fans of Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” here’s the clip featuring the young, hyper-cerebral Alvy Singer who is depressed to the point of incapacitation by the fact that the universe will someday break apart.

Nonetheless, “renewable energy” is the term that the English-speaking world was applies to things like solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, and hydrokinetics; we call these sources “renewable” because they are, for all intents and purposes, limitless.  All this is explained in this infographic I made at about the same time as the video.

And yes, solar is “intermittent” as well.