Renewable Energy has many parts, and some of them can do jobs that others cannot do. It is important to work together to bring the best renewable Energy to the world that we can hope to achieve.
This diagram represents a short overview over different elements of a renewable energy network, and what the different parts can do, and what not.
For example, Hydropower can be both an energy source (flowing water through a turbine) but also a means of energy storage (by keeping the water behind the dam). Renewable Biomass can be stored well, but can also be turned into a renewable source of energy. Batteries can store energy well, but cannot produce energy.
Thoughts, comments, likes :-)
There are different kinds of solar power generation, the photovoltaic panels that generate electricity directly that we all know and love, and thermal solar. You’ll commonly see a small-scaled version of this used on homes as a hot water system.
Scale it up though and you’ve got a system that can generate energy 24/7, as long as you’ve got enough thermal mass, and sunlight.
Same energy (hah) as a corporate venn diagram.
This is a cool diagram, but I think it makes it look like you can’t combine stuff. Obviously solar and wind in a lot of cases just plugged straight into batteries for storage.
On the flippy floppy, hydropower can do both, but in completely different ways. If you build a dam, you can’t generate electricity, and if you build a turbine, you can’t store it.
I don’t know what my point overall is. I guess just that energy is complicated, and there probably isn’t a “one size fits all” fix.
Well yes, but how is that any different from putting batteries in your wind farm?
Is biomass renewable, though? I mean it takes a lot of time for a tree to grow. A lot.
The deforestation of the Amazon is largely driven by a desire for more land to grow biofuels (sugarcane) on.
The byproducts of sugar production (the leaves and stalks) are used to produce ethanol from a biological, renewable source, as opposed to fossil fuels.
Oh, and in the Amazon, said sugarcane farming is often done by slaves.
You either need more farmland to grow what will become biofuels on it, or you have to stop growing food on existing farmland, which means food gets more expensive.
Wood is a material that’s made from carbon that has been extracted from the atmosphere using an organic process.
You can make buildings and furniture out of wood and you’re sequestering carbon while having a nice place to live and some nice furniture.
You can also burn the wood for heat energy. This releases the carbon into the atmosphere, but the tree that got cut down makes space for a new tree to grow. When that new tree grows it pulls out the carbon that was added by burning the wood. So it’s carbon neutral.
Renewable doesn’t mean it’s instantly replaced. It means there’s a well understood process to replace it. It’s not popular among those that hate the lumber industry, but it’s one of the more environmentally friendly options considering global warming. Consider how trees used for building means using carbon extracted from the air for building things. Even burning wood is carbon neutral, so it’s better than most heating options.
Sure, that’s all nice. However at what scale is that sustainable? Also burning wood yields all sorts of fine particles, not just CO2, which are not good for humans. Plus we are reducing forests at global level. Can you imagine the forest area for providing power to a whole city?
Wood wouldn’t be a good option for powering a city, obviously. Neither is coal though.
Global warming isn’t going to be solved by a single solution. Wood makes sense for building materials and for heating in rural areas. It’s not going to be good for producing electricity, but fortunately there’s other technology for that.
Yes, and, once established, a grove of trees can continue providing biomass for literally centuries. Look up coppicing.
@Mihies @gandalf_der_12te Yes it is. The waste from biomass can be used as fertiliser for new plants, so a circle is formed. One tree is not quite the right model, you could think instead about managed forests where older growth is harvested and new growth is always in various stages, from saplings to ‘ready next year’. Carbon from the biomass process is used by the new growth.
Poplars and willows are fairly fast growing. Plus there are perennial grass feedstocks
It is renewable in the sense that given infinite time, you can use it to grow infinite energy (for the nitpickers: assuming an eternal sun).
It is not infinite though and the amount of power you can extract from it is limited but that’s true for every renewable sources: you have a limited amount of places where you can put dams, where you can put windmills or even solar panels.
What is important is that it is not power generation that consumes a scarce good (as fossil power does) but that it is increases in power generation that consumes it, in a reversible way.
If you look at it like that, fossil is renewable as well. Just a tiny bit slower, but still, given enough time … :)
Not really IIRC. Modern bacteria are more efficient at breaking down organic materials and forests buried today won’t make oil anymore.
Where does geothermal fit in all this? I don’t think it can really be used as an energy storage system unless there’s some technique I’m not thinking of, but since it isn’t as intermittent, it doesn’t really need much energy storage either, as far as I’m aware. I’ve noticed it seems to get left out of a lot of discussion on renewables, but I’m not sure why.
In some senses the whole planet is storing a huge amount of energy underground.
But yeah I think in the context of this kind of discussion it’s would be a renewable energy source. While it’s probably technically not renewable, but there’s so much of it we’d never run out. I mean if you want to be super-pedantic, solar and wind aren’t renewable either because we don’t have a way to make a new sun when that thing burns out, but it’s like come on.
But probably not a storage solution, because why would you put energy into the Earth’s core? We worried about hell freezing over or something?
Biomass and hydro* aren’t storage for intermittent power (*except pumped hydro). Rather they are natural sources of accumulated solar power that can be tapped on demand. In that sense, so is geothermal.
Nah it’s friction from rocks banging into each other when the Earth was being formed. The surface of the Earth cooled down, but you dig down deep enough it gets really hot. Hot enough to melt rocks, or as the pros call it… “magma”. Dump some water down there and you get steam and you can drive a turbine with that steam. Though actual geothermal energy implementations are probably a little more complicated than that. But that’s the gist of it.
