What is the most promising renewable energy source?

The most promising source of renewable energy is definitely solar energy. This is primarily because the Sun is the most abundant source of renewable energy available on our planet. At this time solar energy, despite its huge popularity, still accounts for less than one percent of total global energy demand, which means that world is still far away from turning solar power into a dominant source of energy on our planet.

Fossil fuels will likely continue to rule the energy world, at least for the next 30-50 years, if not till the end of this century. Fossil fuels have tradition and proven technology, not to mention the powerful lobbies on their side. However, world has to also think about the climate change issue and this is where renewable energy sources such as solar have a huge edge over fossil fuels.

The prices of solar panels have been experiencing steady decline for the past couple of years, and this trend will also have to continue in years to come. Why? Because solar power technologies first need to achieve cost-competitiveness with fossil fuels before being implemented on much wider scale.

The intermittency of solar energy is also one of the issues that solar energy industry will have to solve as soon as possible. There have been many promising solar energy storage solutions that could do the trick for intermittency but science still has to find the adequate energy storage solution that would be commercially viable.

Solar panels also need to significantly improve their efficiency. The current average level of efficiency is less than 20%, which means that lot of potentially useful energy gets wasted in the form of heat. Scientists have done numerous researches with the goal of improving the efficiency of solar cells but so far the majority of proposed solutions have been connected with high costs.

Solar power technologies have only started developing and they will certainly take some time before fulfilling their enormous potential. Solar energy is currently having huge public support as well as large funds at its disposal which means that solar power industry has excellent foundations on which to build its future.

Posted in: Green Ideas