There are More Sources than We Tend to Think About
There is now a “Green” movement across the globe. With the ability to share information over the net, it’s just too hard to hide the facts about the depletion of our global oil supply. With that in mind there is so much energy available and renewable that we have not looked into enough. Most of our renewable sources are very clean and basically will inexhaustible, since they come from forces within and about the planet. Geothermal, solar, wind, tidal, and wave energy are just some of the forces that are being harnessed for electrical production.
Even though we used new names for all of our “new” renewable sources of energy, in ancient times they were called the primal elements: Earth, Fire, Air, and Water. So in essence we have had these sources at our disposal for a long time, and in some ways we have harnessed their power for some uses, but now we are looking at them as a potential source of mass producing electricity. Oceans comprise the bulk of the mass of our planet, but research into wave power is fairly new.
There are a number of challenges involved in harnessing the power of waves for electrical generation. Some of the major concerns are efficiency, and durability. Efficiency has always been a critical issue for renewable sources of energy. A method to harness the power has to be economically viable on a mass scale in order to make sense and we are just now crossing that threshold. Then there is the problem of durability. The oceans of the world are notoriously unforgiving. Any type of power generation plant would need to be able to survive storm damage and saltwater corrosion.
The good news is that as recently as 2008 the world’s first commercial wave farm went online and is producing electricity in Portugal. It all goes to show that there is hope for weaning ourselves from the dependency on fossil fuels. The only issue now is whether or not the process has begun on time. It’s not something that I need to worry about in my lifetime, but for my children and their children the race is on and the clock is ticking. Time is as unforgiving as the oceans.
