why should more people use solar power and wind power?
Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at
2:17 am
why should more people use solar power and wind power? and what are the benefits of both of them? does it save you money, how much and how much will it help the earth if one person decided to use them? what about a hundred people? what would happen if everyone and every building, cars, trains, airplanes, EVERYTHING in the whole world started using solar/wind power?
oh sorry, forgot about water power. what about water power? again, water power benifits, same as above.
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Tagged with: airplanes • building cars • earth • money • solar power • solar wind • trains • water power • Wind Power
Filed under: Wind Power
Solar panels are not as "Eco friendly" as you may think. Solar panels are a semi conductor type device as as such the manufacturing process generates lots of Hazardous Waste that need to be disposed of.
Solar panels produce DC power which has limited use in homes wired for use with AC power. Thus expensive inverters are required to change the DC into usable AC. It is possible to use some Solar generated DC in a home. One efficient way of DC usage would be to use a separate DC lighting circuit. This would eliminate the need for an expensive DC to AC inverter and operate more efficiently.
The down side of using DC is the necessity of rewiring a home or having DC operated equipment.
There is also the issue of where to install wind and or solar systems as not all homes are ideally located.
System installation is expensive and is another source of maintenance expenses a home owner must bare. Consider the damage that can be done by a hail storm to a solar system.
Then there is the long time required to break even and recover the installation costs. Without significant subsidies one can easily spend 10’s of thousand of dollars which requires decades to break even. Traditional electric providers by comparison provide low cost maintenance free electricity.
EDIT:
Phillip is pointing out an obvious problem…..there are too many people on the planet. Billions of people demanding resources.
They are both extremely eco-friendly, but each one has its own drawbacks. The sun doesn’t always shine on solar panels, so several days without sunlight could potentially leave you without power. Just the same, the wind don’t always blow. Of course there are ways to store energy that is produced by these means, such as cells or batteries. As a form of energy for a single residence, these two sources are great. But for mass energy output, they are not very feasible, and cost way too much to maintain versus the energy they produce, which is not much for the money.
People, as individuals, can not realistically gather solar power or wind power on their own. Not in great amounts anyway (barely enough to cover their direct electrical usage – not even close to all the electricity used in making the things they use. An individual can not erase their electrical footprint on their own.). A better alternative is to petition to your local government to designate areas where wind turbines and solar generators are to be built (by companies), or to build them themselves.
The benefits of both systems are that they do not produce much waste, and that they do not use resources other than the sun itself. (Sunlight -> electricity and Sunlight -> heat -> pressure differences -> wind -> electricity respectively). A downside is that many solar power systems require semiconductors, which have to be pure and can thus be expensive or even polluting to make. And wind turbines are even worse: aluminium requires a massive amount of electrical energy to recycle, which currently mostly (60% of world production) happens in Iceland, meaning that the aluminium has to be transported by – you guessed it – oil-guzzling transport ships. So wind turbines aren’t as clean as they sound.
If 5 billion people would switch to completely renewable energy, and the remaining 1.8 billion people would consume as much as the average American consumes now, then the world would still run out of energy. THAT is how bad the energy crisis is. And that’s still disregarding the upcoming shortages of several Elements (as in, periodic table of the elements), due to our massive waste production. If we do nothing, we will no longer be able to use fertilizer 80 years from now. No fertilizer, no food for 80% of the world.
Airplanes can not run on solar or wind power. No mundane source of energy is as compressed as combustibles. You need to set stuff on fire to make airplanes fly.
If every human object would use solar and wind power, we would run our of several metals required to make those things work. And we would still have the problems of other elements running out.