Renewable Energy Sources

Currently, we rely on fossil fuels to generate over 80% of the world’s energy uses. These are things like coal, oil, petroleum and natural gas. These are all things that are created naturally on Earth. Using fossil fuels is bad for 2 reasons;

1. We are using the world’s resources and will eventually have none left also meaning that we have changed the makeup of the Earth
2. Burning fossil fuels creates gases like methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide known as greenhouse gases because of the way that they let radiation into the ozone layer (from the sun) but don’t let it back out again resulting in the warming of the Earth. We call this Global Warming

We don’t have to use fossil fuels to generate energy, we can use renewable energy sources like the ones below;

1. Solar
   1. Energy from the sun that is captured using a solar panel
2. Wind
   1. Energy is taken from wind power using wind-turbines
3. Hydroelectricity
   1. Energy is taken from flowing water, such as a river, and captured in a dam or watermills
4. Geothermal
   1. Using the Earths own heat, energy is captured from the ground and used
5. Ocean
   1. Motion energy can be gathered from the ocean waves that are caused by the moon cycles
6. Bioenergy
   1. The energy created by the fermenting of plants or food waste
7. Hydrogen
   1. Man-Made hydrogen can be used to fuel cars in the future as it emits little to no greenhouse gasses

Using these energy sources would be good because it would drastically reduce the amount of greenhouse gases being produced into the atmosphere, stop the infrastructure needed to obtain these gases, like fracking, and prevent physical damage to our planet that mining brings.

Power stations across the world need to be built to use these energy sources instead of using more fossil fuels. We could do everything from power and heat our homes and schools to run our cars without having a negative impact on the Earth.

While we may not have much control over the government and getting energy companies to transfer to a renewable source, we can install solar panels on our homes, make the jump to an electric car and buy products that either uses rechargeable batteries or can be generated by a renewable energy source, such as outside lights.