Renewable energy as a concept has been an integral part of human development. Long before scientific developments gave us the power to harness the energy stored beneath the dirt, we were reliant on renewable sources of energy to help us thrive in our day-to-day life. Whether it is something as simple as using sunshine to dry our clothes or warm our water. To more complex activities, like harnessing the ever-present wind for sailing across the oceans. Humans have always had a knack for finding ways to work with nature for our benefit.
With the invention of new technologies, we as a species, have only increased this investment in renewable energy production. As it isn’t hard to understand that renewable energy is truly the key to sustainable development. A big part of what makes this such a safe bet for our futures is the definition itself.
A renewable energy source is any source of energy that will replenish itself naturally within a human timescale. This means that whether we utilize the energy or waste it, we will still have the almost exact same amount of energy available for use, sometime in the future. This makes it quite beneficial to invest in this form of energy production, as short of any unnatural disaster, you are almost guaranteed to have a near-endless supply of energy, long after the capital investment has been recouped.
Today, solar energy is considered to be the safest bet when it comes to renewables, even though it is available only half the time. Mostly because the sun already oversaturates our world with solar energy in just half a day. In fact, if we could capture all the energy that the Earth receives in a 24-hour period across the globe, we would have enough energy to power all human households for up to a year.
This makes it a truly renewable source of energy, as we will never run out of solar energy to capture. Even the most conservative estimates state that we can power human civilization with solar energy for another 4.5 billion years before we would need to worry about the stability of the sun. But what exactly is this nearly endless source of energy that can keep our solar system powered for billions of years? The answer to this question is a simple one, but it complicates our renewable energy narrative a little bit.
As we all know, the sun is a star, which essentially means that it is a super-dense ball of superheated metals and minerals, which in itself is a euphemism for nuclear fuel. Which burns in a self-sustaining nuclear reaction that will run for millions and billions of years, until all the material is consumed, and it all collapses in on itself. This means that technically, it isn’t a truly naturally replenishing source, as once the reaction ends, we have no way of restarting it ourselves.
While this does complicate the definition a little bit, it doesn’t exactly change the category, since even though we cannot control the reaction, we can still benefit from it, for the foreseen future of mankind. Moreover, with advancements in thermal capture and battery storage technologies, we will only increase our share of this renewable source, as our coal and oil reserves are set to eventually run out in another century or two. This might not happen overnight, but it will be a gradual decline of an industry that has been the backbone of the modern world.
Thankfully, we can prevent this decline, by instead investing in retraining the workers for solar energy capture. So, they can contribute towards accelerating the adoption of a clean, green, source of energy, in both residential, commercial, and industrial applications. This is the promise of renewable energy and the hope of Renewable India.
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