Renewable energy comes from sustainable sources such as hydropower, wind power, solar power, geothermal power, biomass, and tidal power. Unlike fossil fuels such as natural gas or coal, and uranium ore, these energy sources are not depleted, so they are called renewable. The first factor leads to an understanding of the need to use other energy sources. Sooner or later, even the wealthiest deposits will exhaust themselves, so the search for new options for obtaining energy becomes more relevant every year. The second factor, and perhaps the first in importance, is the impact on the planet’s ecology. Greenhouse gas emissions from the combustion of minerals upset the climate balance. The consequences of climate change have become more and more tangible in the past decade. Heavy rains and hurricanes, snow in the middle of spring, periods of prolonged droughts, floods, tornadoes, and other natural phenomena occur more often, and we cannot control them. The only way for people to reduce the rate of climate change is to switch to more environmentally friendly energy sources, which include renewable or alternative ones: sun, wind, water, biogas, and others.
The whole world is now responsible for the ecology of the planet. The US is the leader behind China in renewable energy investment (Bushnell & Novan, 2018). Given the critical role of the Paris Accords in global warming, large companies everywhere in America are switching to, example, solar energy – for example, Facebook, General Motors, and IKEA (Bushnell & Novan, 2018). Solar power plants create a relatively large number of jobs, and the development of photovoltaic batteries makes production cheaper every day, which gives a complete environmental and economic advantage. However, they can only be used as an auxiliary due to their instability. The primary trend will be to focus on geothermal energy sources, which require a more severe approach to creation but are reliable, regardless of the season and weather, and their potential is more than forty-five terawatt-hours per year (Basosi et al., 2020). In this regard, the most likely change in the world will be a large number of geothermal sources and solar panels and corresponding changes in the field of education – for training, an increase in the number of jobs, and massive investment in these promising areas.
References
Basosi, R., Bonciani, R., Frosali, D., Manfrida, G., Parisi, M. L., & Sansone, F. (2020). Life cycle analysis of a geothermal power plant: Comparison of the environmental performance with other renewable energy systems. Sustainability, 12(7), 2786.
Bushnell, J., & Novan, K. (2018). Setting with the sun: the impacts of renewable energy on wholesale power markets (No. w24980). National Bureau of Economic Research.