• Question: Do you think that renewable energy sources in the current state can ever provide us with significant amounts of energy?

    Asked by bdrchung9000 to Murray on 16 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Murray Collins

      Murray Collins answered on 16 Mar 2011:

      Hi

      At the moment it doens’t seem so. In terms of the total energy consumption across the planet renewables don’t contribute very much at the moment. Energy demands are increasing all the time as well. So in your previous question (http://ias.im/35.341) I mentioned nuclear energy, even despite the recent accident in Japan.

      However I do think we need to continue to invest in renewable energy like solar power (photo-voltaic cells) so that companies and scientists can continue to investigate better, more efficient, ways of harnessing the sun’s energy (thinner, cheaper photo-voltaic cells for example). Just because these sources aren’t producing a major proportion of our power now, it doesn’t mean that they can’t in the future. But as I say, that means we need to continue to invest in them to help drive innovation to make them better!

      Since our energy demands are increasing, we need to address consumption of energy too. We can do this by making more energy efficient products, and also increasing the efficiency of the processes used to make those products. In the broader discussions you might hear about carbon emissions, the emissions which were emitted during the process of manufacturing a product are often called ’embedded emissions’. So we can also increase the efficiency of how we make things. This also includes our houses, since building/construction uses a lot of energy.

      In terms of how to do all this, then policy makers take advice from people like environmental economists who work out how best to use things like taxes or new laws to make it more expensive to create emissions. This means that companies have an incentive to reduce emissions in manufacturing and also make more energy efficient products. I just went to an environmental economics conference where someone showed how laws across the European Union had lead to the production of increasingly efficient products over the past ten years.

      Let me know what you think!

Comments

  • Photo: bdrchung9000

    bdrchung9000 commented on :

    i hope that the goverment and EU listen more to scientists and support research and subsidse techonolgys such as hydrogen fuel cells for cars. alongside carbon capture and other forms of producing carbon dioxide free energy(such as nuclear like you said). it would allow a small reduction in emissions quickly and then a further reduction as these techonlogies became more efficent in the future. hopefully one day leading to a practically zero emission system or a “postive?” (not sure if this is possible) where more carbon dioxide is taken out of the atmosphere than put in. not sure if any of that made sense but thats what i think (: