Why Renewable Energy?
Renewable energy increasingly receives importance in research and development in most of the countries around the world, nowadays. Renewable energy is an energy that can be sourced from a non-depleting energy sources and usually non-pollutant unlike fossil fuel energy sources. Examples of such renewable energy sources are;
1. Solar energy
2. Wind Energy
3. Ocean waves
4. Hydrogen
6. Hydro (water in a dam)
On the other hand, the examples of non-renewable energy sources are fossil fuels like,
1. Oil
2. Natural Gas
3. Coal
Uranium is considered as non-renewable source of energy but it is not a fossil fuel.
Why do we want renewable energy?
The answer is simple. Because it is renewable such that it will not deplete for even a very long duration of time that we are using it, unlike fossil fuels, like oil, that will soon deplete once we already consumed the oil in oil reserves and sources around the globe. There is a projection that on year 2020, the world has already consumed almost half of the oil in the world assuming no further discoveries of oil deposits has progressed.
The following are the reasons why renewable energy is better than fossil fuels;
1. It is renewable and does not deplete.
2. It is clean and non-pollutant, unlike fossils fuels that emit dangerous hydrocarbons in the air once it is burned.
3. It can be available locally, unlike fossil fuels that are available only in some countries which has oil reserves. Thus, the cost of energy is not controlled by the economic and political situation of other countries that are involve in supplying oil.
4. Once the renewable energy producing plants has been completely established and the investments has already been recovered, the cost of the energy will be cheaper than the cost of fossil fuel because the sources is abundant and it is free.
Of course, renewable energy has some disadvantages. That is why the progress of its development is not as fast as the development in the exploration of fossil fuels. Listed below are some of these disadvantages.
1. The research and development does not guarantee a usable product, like the research on how to extract hydrogen from water at a low cost.
2. The investment for the conversion of renewable energy to a usable form like electricity is relatively much higher than the investment for the construction of plants that generates electricity using coal or diesel. Solar panel and wind farms for example require millions of dollars just to generate 1 Megawatt of electricity.
3. The quality of the output energy is most of the time not compatible with the current and existing technology. The electricity for example need to have a constant voltage magnitude and frequency but the output electricity of wind powered generator does not have constant magnitude and frequency due to the intermittent blow of wind. There is also some doubt whether a coco-diesel, ethanol, and hydrogen can be used in car that was designed to run using diesel or gasoline.
4. The lack of awareness of the people and support from the government further staggered its development.
However, due to the necessity to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, no matter how big and high the barriers are, for its development, we have no choice but to break it.
Filed in: Renewable Energy - 
