The Renewable Energy Space
The alternative energy industry includes two main sections: renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, and hydroelectric power, and other vehicle fuels, such as natural gas, electricity, and biodiesel.
For the majority of the 2010s, the two renewable energy resources that enjoyed the most growth were wind and solar. Wind generating capacity improved tremendously during the first half of the 2010s, and while it continued to grow in the second half as well, the percent increases were marginally reduced. In its”Global Wind Report 2018,” the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) noted the total wind generating capacity rose by 9.0 percent over 2017 levels, since the 51.3 gigawatts (Gw) of additional capacity brought the entire world complete to 591 Gw. While impressive, 53.5 Gw were inserted in 2017, therefore the 51.3 Gw figure was actually a slight drop from the previous year concerning the rate of increase.
In the realm of automobiles, low oil prices and healthy economic conditions led to a massive increase in purchasing vehicles of all kinds in 2017 and 2018. Based on Cox Automotive, Americans bought approximately 17.3 million automobiles in 2018up from 17.2 million in 2017, marking four consecutive years of earnings that exceeded 17.0 million units. Data from Within EVs revealed that sales of electric vehicles reached 361,307 units in 2018, an increase of 81 percent over 199,826 units the previous year. More than half of the earnings were attributable to Tesla, which sold 139,782 of its Model 3 (the industry’s bestseller) alone. The Toyota Prius Prime has been the second-best-selling electric car, in 27,595 units. Electric automobiles were however only a minuscule portion of their total U.S. vehicle market at the close of the decade.
Alternative Energy Steps In
Alternative energy primarily concentrates on clean, renewable energy sources which leave little or no carbon footprints on the earth which contribute to depletion of the ozone pollution, and global warming. Therefore, the alternative energy field frequently incorporates the terms”clean energy” or”green energy” There are many other sources available, but the challenge demands an ability to produce alternative fuel in adequate quantities to coincide with depleting traditional sources, while still maintaining global and environmental stability and wellness.
Hydropower, Wind, and Solar.
An established source of renewable, renewable energy, hydropower operates by converting the kinetic energy produced from falling water to electricity. As stated by the National Hydropower Association (NHA), hydropower is the United States’ leading renewable energy supply. The NHA reported that hydropower is responsible for 8 to 12 percent of U.S. electrical production, although this figure changes in different regions of the country. America is a world leader in hydropower production, second only to Canada.
Long the favorite of renewable energy supporters, solar energy adoption is increasing from earlier levels, when it provided less than 1 per cent of energy needs. The untapped energy potential of the sun is huge. For example, scientists surmised that a single day’s worth of sunlight, if properly harnessed and transformed, could supply the entire energy requirements of the United States for two years, and that the daily dose of solarenergy outpaced that of the world’s whole fossil fuel energy by a ratio of 1,000 to 1.
Solar energy is harnessed by photovoltaic (PV) systems, which act as the mediator between sunlight and the desired energy by converting sunlight directly to electricity. PV systems were finding increasing use in families, automobiles, and distant energy systems, and for telecommunications, light systems, along with a range of different applications.
Wind electricity includes the generation of power using windmills of a variety of sizes and types. Although wind power is used to give energy for individual houses, it’s harnessed using huge”wind turbines” and big, utility-scale wind turbines. Single giant windmills capable of providing electricity to several thousand homes are working in numerous areas of america. Wind power projects have received increased focus nationwide as well as global.
Alternative Fuel Sources.
From the alternative fuels sector, a number of energy sources have shown promise in powering vehicles without reliance on petrol. Since the EIA explains:”A battery-powered EV employs the electricity from onboard rechargeable batteries to operate an electric motor, which turns the car’s wheels. A hybrid vehicle contains two sources of energy. For example, it may use a lean burn gasoline engine in combination with batteries.
Hydrogen remains a top experimental vehicle fuel. It is made by hydrogen-rich materials such as water, renewable fuels, biomass, and fossil fuels. Potential hydrogen sources include natural gas, methanol, ethanol, petroleum, landfill waste, and coal. According to the EIA, high production costs and storage problems have been roadblocks into the mass adoption of hydrogen as an alternate fuel.
Two kinds of natural gas are used as alternative vehicle fuels. Compressed natural gas (CNG) can be used in mild and medium-duty vehicles, while liquefied natural gas (LNG) is primarily used in heavy-duty vehicles as a diesel substitute.
Also known as propane, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is a by-product of petroleum refining and natural gas processing. It’s composed of a mixture that contains 2.5 percent butane and higher hydrocarbons, at least 90 percent propane, and a balance of ethane and propylene. Propane is stored in liquid form, but is switched back into a gas before being burned by means of a vehicle’s engine.
Ethanol is a liquid alcohol fuel produced from corn. In addition to agricultural plants, it can be produced from farming and forestry waste, municipal waste, and wastepaper. According to the EIA,”As an alternative fuel, ethanol is typically employed as a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, known as E85, which will be appropriate for light-duty vehicles. The other less common ethanol/gasoline combination is a 95/5 percent blend called E95.”
Methanol also is a liquid alcohol fuel. But, it is created from natural gas, coal, and carbon-rich sources like seaweed, garbage, and waste wood. Methanol is largely used in light-duty, flexible-fuel vehicles that operate on gasoline, methanol, or even a combination of every fuel type. M85, a mixture consisting of 85 percent methanol and 15 percent gasoline, is the most frequent mixture of this fuel type.
According to the National Biodiesel Board, the nationwide trade association of the U.S. biodiesel industry, biodiesel is a clean burning alternative fuel that’s made of domestic, renewable sources like soybeans. It contains no petroleum, can be blended at any level with petroleum diesel, also needs few if any engine modifications.
Break-down by Sector
Solar.
Humankind’s usage of some renewable energy resources dates back thousands of years, while other uses are somewhat more recent. The first experimenter to successfully convert sunlight into electricity was French physicist Edmond Becquerel (1820–1891), that noted the PV impact in 1839 when he built a system that could assess the intensity of light by observing the strength of an electric current between two metal plates. For over 110 years after the initial discovery of the PV effect, scientists experimented with various materials in an effort to find a practical use for PV systems. From the late nineteenth century, scientists discovered that the metallic selenium was particularly sensitive to sun, and during the 1880s Charles Fritts constructed the first selenium solar cell. His device, however, was inefficient, switching less than 1 percent of the received light into usable electricity.
The Fritts selenium solar cell was mostly abandoned before the 1950s, once the drive to make an efficient solar cell was revived. It was understood that the key to this photovoltaic cell lay in creating a semiconductor that would discharge electrons when exposed to radiation within the visible spectrum. During this time period, researchers at the Bell Telephone Laboratories were growing similar semiconductors to be used in communicating systems. Bell scientists Calvin Fuller and Daryl Chapin accidentally found the ideal semiconductor: a hybridized crystal called a”doped” cell, which was made from phosphorous and boron. The first solar cells using such new crystals debuted in 1954 and yielded a conversion efficiency of nearly 6 per cent. Later improvements in the design increased the efficiency to almost 15 percent.
In 1957 Bell Telephone used a silicon solar cell to power a telephone repeater station in Georgia. The procedure was regarded as a success but it remained too inefficient to permeate the overall market. The first real use of solar cells arrived in 1958 when a solar array was used to give electricity for its radio transmitter of Vanguard 1, the second U.S. satellite to orbit the earth. Solar cells have been used on nearly every satellite launched since then.
The oil crisis in the early 1970s and also the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl greatly improved the public’s desire for alternative and renewable energies. As ecological consciousness climbed, solar energy was favored in the renewables sector. It wasn’t until the late twentieth century which solar energy became practical and economical enough to warrant broad-scale marketing as one of the primary energy resources of the future. In the 1990s alone, the price of solar energy dropped 50 percent as technology continued to progress. It was during that decade which PV software went from a niche source of electricity for bringing solar technology into the brink of big business. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, over 10,000 homes in the United States were driven completely by solar energy in the late 1990s, and an extra 200,000 homes incorporated some form of photovoltaic system.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, there have been more than 100,000 individuals using solar energy and alive”off the grid,” independent of utility companies, in the USA. However, solar energy represented only about 1 percent of all electric power in the United States that year, primarily because of its persistently high prices and the continuing availability of inexpensive energy via traditional sources. There was little market-based incentive for customers to replace their existing energy technologies with photovoltaic systems.
Hydropower.
Hydro.
Water has been used as an energy supply for many centuries. Water turbines are essentially updated and more efficient variants of waterwheels, which have been used for millennia. The first commercially successful water turbine design was developed by Frenchman Benoît Fourneyron (1802–1867) from the 1820s. Over 100 such turbines were eventually installed globally. These turbines were, however, costly to assemble, physically unstable, and hard to control speed of rotation. They were eventually supplanted by the layouts developed by American James Francis in the 1830s. Francis-type turbines remained one of the key turbine designs used in contemporary applications of the time. Water turbines have been in widespread use by the mid-nineteenth century, primarily to electricity saw and textile mills, although they were soon replaced in these programs by steam engines.
Water turbines were used to generate electricity on a commercial basis in 1882, when a 12.5-kilowatt station in Wisconsin supplied power to light paper mills. The use of hydroelectric power grew rapidly thereafter, with the very first 100,000-kilowatt installations built in the 1930s. From the 1940s to the early 1970s, a high number of small hydroelectric stations, most with less than 1,000-kilowatt capacity, were closed due to their relatively large price. Meanwhile, from the 1950s to the late 1980s, the manufacturing capacity of typical water turbine generators doubled from 150,000 to 300,000 kilowatts, with the biggest of units capable of generating 750,000 kilowatts.
A continuing problem for the hydroelectric industry in the United States has been fish kills, particularly salmon and steelhead trout. These fish try to swim upstream in the sea to a river whilst spawning. But when a hydroelectric station is along their route, the fish could get caught in the turbine blades. This is particularly problematic in the Pacific Northwest in Washington’s Columbia River Basin. Salmon and steelhead runs there declined from 11 to 16 million fish a year in pre-Colonial occasions to 2 million or million fish in the late 1990s.
Wind.
Wind-powered generators offer an increasingly viable alternative power supply. Considering that the mid-1980s, the cost of producing electricity with windmills has fallen over fourfold, bringing wind power on a level with power generated using petroleum, coal, and natural gas. However, windmills had the downsides of being noisy and dangerous to birds. When properly situated, however, it is possible to mitigate those problems.
Three 750-kilowatt wind turbines were installed in Algona, Texas, before 2000, while other wind turbine projects were planned in Nebraska, Texas, Oklahoma, New York, Wisconsin, and Alaska. Wind electricity was the fastest-growing segment from the energy generation industry by 2003.
Renewables in the Twenty-First Century.
During the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that corporate investments in renewable energy were rising. For example, annual revenue hikes of 30 to 40 percent prompted the solar systems division of Sharp Electronics to program an expansion of its solar panel fabrication plant at Memphis, Tennessee. In 2002 General Electric acquired Enron’s wind power division, and in 2004 the company obtained AstroPower, the top U.S. supplier of solar gear. Personal investments also were rising. The same dilemma of Bloomberg Businessweek indicated that, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers Money Tree Survey, $76 million in venture capital investments were made in the first half of 2004 alone, outpacing all investments for 2003.
Wind electricity continued to garner greater attention as a combination of government assistance and improvements in wind turbine technology supported growth within this category. Examples included low interest loans for renewable energy projects in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, federal tax credits for wind-generated power, and a few $300 million in state grants particular to renewable energy projects.
According to the EIA, in 2008 renewable sources of energy generated only about 7.3 percent of total U.S. energy consumption and 9 percent of electricity production. President Obama’s Economic Stimulus bill, officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, directly allocated approximately $47 billion for renewable energy initiatives, smart grids, and other energy-efficient programs. In addition, $20 billion was made available for tax incentives and new investment tax credits for manufacturers of renewable energy technology. For individual taxpayers, tax incentives and credits were authorized for homeowners that adopted geothermal heat systems and solar hot water heaters.
According to Clean Edge, the research and advisory company devoted to the clean-tech sector, the combined global market for solar photovoltaics, biofuels, and end electricity exceeding $248.7 billion in 2012, up from $188.1 billion in 2010.
According to figures published by the GWEC in 2012, China had enough installed wind turbines to create 75,564 Gw of electric energy.
The largest fuel renewable fuel supply being used by 2012 has been uranium, with about 8.5 million vehicles in use. Over 57,000 vehicles powered by electricity were on the road by 2010.
From the mid-2010s, global demand for energy, alternative and was powerful, fueled in part by a rise in energy use in emerging countries all around the world. Based on 2014 Key World Energy Statistics, a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), there have been gains in the supply of most forms of energy. (One exception has been atomic power, which revealed a decrease from the early 2010s.) As may be expected, then, together with global demand increasing, demand for solar, wind, and hydroelectric energy has been very strong; in some cases, though, instead of replacing conventional energy sources, these alternative forms of energy were simply being executed alongside existing energy sources like coal and petroleum. On the other hand, the IEA noted in a different report that renewable energy sources accounted for 13.2 percent of the total global energy supply,”and in 2013 renewables accounted for nearly 22% of global electricity generation, a 5% growth from 2012.” Therefore, alternative forms of energy had been becoming a larger part of the overall energy mix, although they were not as prominent as conventional sources.
Concerning alternative vehicle fuels, more vehicles were on the street in 2014 than in any time, and as might be expected, demand increased for vehicles with alternative fuel resources. In automobiles, this supposed increases in electric cars and cars running on biodiesel.
An August 2014 article by Feifei Shen at Bloomberg noted that”China added 3.3 gigawatts of solar capacity in the six months ended June 30, double last year’s additions.” The article speculated that air pollution was one reason China was looking to change to solar and move away from more traditional energy resources.
As mentioned in a March 2015 article by Joshua Hill for Clean Technica,”global wind power installations grew by 42% in 2014.” Hill cited data from Navigant Research and also stated that the countries taking the lead in wind generation were China, Germany, and the USA. China installed 23.3 Gw) in 2014, with Germany (5.1 Gw of fresh installment ) and the USA (4.9 Gw) far behind.
For hydropower, drought in various parts of the Earth, for example Brazil, caused problems for a few hydropower installations. Still, Hydroworld.com noted in April 2015 there were continuing projects in areas as far-flung as Tajikistan, Colombia, Uganda, and Laos. Many of these countries were emerging markets which stood to benefit in the stable supply of inexpensive power that hydroelectric typically provided.
Regarding alternative fuels, a January 2015 report on EVObsession.com noted that sales of all-electric vehicles in the USA grew up 58 percent in 2014 over 2013 levels. Leading the way was that the Nissan Leaf, with 30,200 units offered.
A 2014 report by Edward Dodge at the Energy Collective discussed new North American sulfur emission requirements for maritime vessels was increasing requirement for LNG-fueled ships. Before, large vessels frequently employed bunker fuel, which was a very low level of petroleum with elevated emissions. However, costs related to bunker fuel have grown while natural gas prices have dropped, making LNG a viable choice.
In terms of adding wind generation capacity, the GWEC observed the top few nations remained unchanged in 2016. China led the way with 23.4 Gw, followed by the USA (8.2 Gw) and then Germany (5.4 Gw). In fourth position was India, which added more wind power than ever before: 3.6 Gw. In general, China accounted for 43 percent of added global capacity, and also the top four states combined accounted for nearly three-fourths of all added capacity.
In the realm of added solar power, in 2016 the top two nations were China and the USA. Both countries almost doubled their capacity, which resulted in an increase in total entire solar generating capacity from 50 Gw at 2016 to 76 Gw one year afterwards, as noticed by Adam Vaughan in a March 2017 story for The Guardian. Vaughan remarked,”Globally there is currently 305GW of solar energy capacityup from around 50GW in 2010 and virtually nothing at the turn of this millennium.” A subsequent May 2017 post at the Independent stated that China had increased in solar capacity in the first quarter of 2017 by 80 percent, while a June 2017 post in Green Tech Media by Mike Munsell stated that the United States added 2 Gw more in solar energy capacity at those same three months. In 2016 and 2017, solar power seemed to be surging in both China and United States.
From the world of alternate fuels, automaker Volvo made a bold proclamation in mid-2017, vowing to make only electric or hybrid vehicles by 2019. As mentioned in a July 2017 Reuters post by Niklas Pollard, this made Volvo (owned by Chinese company Geely) that the”first major conventional automaker to set a date for phasing out vehicles powered solely by the internal combustion engine” Other automakers were coming out with electric-only and hybrid models, as this appeared to be the alternate vehicle fuel supply enjoying the maximum interest from the next half of the 2010s.
Current Issues and Where We’re Going
According to the energy research and consultancy company, Wood Mackenzie, in 2018 global solar energy installations were expected to fall for the first time since 2001, falling from 97.3 gigawatt daily capacity (GWdc) into 94.8 GWdc. But, installations were projected to reach 103.8 GWdc in 2019 and 117.1 GWdc in 2020. Although China held a commanding 55 percent of the global market in 2017, this was expected to change throughout the early 2020s, together with the country’s installations at about 19 percent by 2023. China’s declining market share was reflected in statistics from the International Renewable Energy Association and Deloitte Insights, which put its market share at 33.87 percent in 2018. That year, Japan held 12.6 percentage of the marketplace, followed by Germany (11.0%) and the United States (10.7%).
By 2019 end energy had become the United States’ largest source of renewable generating capacity, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), which included total operating wind capacity at 97,233 MW in early 2019. Capacity totaled 96,433 megawatts in 2018 and 88,964 MW in 2017. The AWEA revealed more than 56,600 wind turbines were in operation across 41 states, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Over the previous decade, wind power had more than tripled in the USA, thanks to $142 billion in new wind power project investments in this timeframe. The International Renewable Energy Association and Deloitte Insights suggested that, worldwide, the United States ranked second in total wind power capacity, accounting for 17.69 percentage of the global market. China was named as the market leader, at 32.63 percent. Other leading countries included Germany (10.21%), India (6.65%), and Spain (4.65%).
Worldwide, electric car sales were expected to surpass combustion motor car revenue by 2033, based on an estimate by the global law firm, Linklaters. Nevertheless, this will require $150 billion in global investments in areas such as mining, recycling, and infrastructure. The company estimated that $80 billion will be needed to develop the infrastructure required for ultra-fast electric vehicle charging.
