
Natural gas, oil, and coal have dominated the electricity market for the last few generations.  They are able to generate electricity at a cheap price, making them each very popular.  These methods, however, are dirty.  They produce a large amount of the carbon dioxide that has, over time, become a major threat to the environment.  The main cause of climate change is the use of these dirty methods to generate electricity.  Because of this, renewable resources have been becoming increasingly popular among many nations trying to decrease the size of their carbon footprint.  The renewable market is still growing and evolving, so many politicians and world leaders are still skeptical of relying on this technology.  The questions that I will be proposing are:  Is it feasible for renewable resources to eventually completely replace non renewables?  Is there any way to implement such a massive change to the power grid while minimally affecting the lives of the citizens?  And what kind of policies could be implemented to fund this change?   Many studies of the economical and energy production aspects of renewable resources have found that not only can renewables match non renewables in almost every positive field, but over time they can surpass them, and that the citizens are willing to pay for it.  This shows that there is a plausible method to decrease carbon emissions while maintaining the current luxurious lives that we live.  

One of the largest issues that concern the proposing of such a radical change is how it will affect the citizens.  If all the power plants that were producing energy through the use of non renewable resources are shut down, all the people who worked there would be jobless.  Therefore, in order to maintain economic stability, renewable resources would need to at least produce as many jobs as would be lost through the purging of non renewable plants.  Heidi Garret-Peltier has done a comparison of the potential employment possibility of switching to an all renewable system.  In her study, she looked for the amount of full time equivalent jobs produced per one million dollars spent for each energy producing industry.  According to her studies, she found that the current fossil fuel industries “support 2.65 FTE (full time equivalent) jobs per $1 million spending,” while in the renewable market, “$1 million spending creates 7.49 FTE jobs” (Garret-Peltier, 439).  This study shows, blatantly, that the renewable industry would produce almost three times as many jobs as the current fossil fuel industries.  The economy may be effected during the transition process, but overall the countries that implement this change would benefit abundantly.

Energy efficiency is a major factor in any electrical grid.  The more efficient the system is, the less fuel is required.  In the case of a renewable resource such as solar energy, more efficient systems can produce the same amount of energy or more with a smaller area.  Because efficiency means two completely different things when talking about different energy systems, renewable resources and non renewable resources cannot be directly compared this way.  Efficiency tables can still be used, however, to show that solar energy, while currently very efficient, is becoming more efficient over time.  Martin A. Green wrote an article in which he listed tables that showed the efficiency of all manner of solar panels.  This article lists the results of previous studies, then adds the newest, most updated results at the end.  Most of the different types of solar panels were showing improvement.  Referring to one in particular, he says one of the results of one of the new studies is “21.0% efficiency for a 1.06-cm2 CdTe (a classification of the silicon cells used in solar panels) cell fabricated by First Solar and measured at Newport Technology and Applications Center. This becomes the highest confirmed efficiency for a thin-film polycrystalline cell of this size” (Green, 4).  This quote and the studies that back it show that solar energy is still improving, meaning that more investments would lead to faster improvements which would in turn lead to a higher energy output with a smaller required area.  The smaller required area means that these solar plants wouldn’t need vast quantities of land in order to produce the amount of power needed for a large metropolitan area.  As they become more efficient, the costs of creating a solar farm would go down, because the government would have to purchase a smaller amount of panels in order to produce the same amount of energy.  

In an article from the New York Times, written by Eduardo Porter, many questions are raised regarding the validity of renewable resources as a primary energy source.  In the article, he states that one of the main concerns with using renewable resources is that they wouldn’t be able to supply energy when “the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing” (Eduardo).  This quote highlights one of the main concerns with any renewable energy systems.  The system can only produce electricity at given times of the day or depending on the weather.  The current non renewable systems are able to produce electricity depending on the need of the consumer.  One way to work around this weakness is through the use of an energy storage system.  The most common form of energy storage currently is through the use of batteries.  Current batteries, however, are unable to store the amounts of energy needed in order to reliably supply an entire power grid with energy during times when renewable resources would be unable to generate electricity.  Many people have proposed different methods for dealing with this problem.  One such person is Mauro Pasta, who has written an article entitled Full open-framework batteries for stationary energy storage where he explains his proposal.  During his proposal, he states that his battery is a “safe, fast, inexpensive, long-cycle life aqueous electrolyte battery” and that “this high rate, high efficiency cell shows a 96.7% round trip energy efficiency when cycled at a 5C rate and an 84.2% energy efficiency at a 50C rate” (Pasta, 1).  The “C” that he uses when discussing rates refers to the Coulomb, which is the measurement of an electrical charge.  Not only is the proposed battery highly efficient, he also states that the materials for this battery can be cheaply mass produced using a simple chemical synthesis with materials that are abundant (Pasta, 1).  This battery would be a cheap way to produce a solution to the problem raised by Porter.  

Another issue raised by Porter is that some countries that have switched to rely more on renewable energy have paid dearly for that.  For example, Australia has recently invested heavily into wind power generators, and when the wind wasn’t blowing as hard as usual during a peak energy usage time, they were forced to reactivate a deactivated gas plant (Porter).  This problem could be solved through the use of energy storage, and one proposed energy storage solution was written by Ryoichi Komiyama.  He proposes a more industrial scale solution using hydrogen storage.  In his article, he highlights that this system would not only provide a long term solution, but also a short term one.  It would allow the country of implementation to wean itself off of non renewable resources by implementing the storage system with current renewables.  The current renewables would be used as the primary source of energy, excess energy would be stored, and if more energy is needed, it would be produced by non renewable energy producing power plants.  As more renewable energy is implemented into the power grid, the need for non renewables would decrease over time, steadily decreasing the pollution caused by these sources.  The author also states that “hydrogen storage is economically competitive with [the] rechargeable battery” (Komiyama, 553).  The hydrogen storage method by itself would be a valuable asset in order to decrease carbon emissions, but paired with Komiyama’s implementation plan, it is a much needed solution.  As renewables become cheaper and more efficient, renewable energy plants will become a more attractive asset, and his plan allows them to be implemented while minimally affecting the lives of the citizens.  If Australia were to have implemented such a system before investing fully in wind generated power, they could have avoided the mishap mentioned earlier.  

The largest factor that drives the change from non renewable energy to renewable energy is how the citizens feel about it, since ultimately, they would be the ones paying for it.  A most controversial method would be to implement the infamous carbon tax, where taxpayers pay a tax that changes depending on the extent to which they have “gone green.”  For example, a person who drives a Ford F-350 would pay a higher tax than one who drives a hybrid vehicle.  This tax, while effective, would only work if the citizens were willing to pay the extra dollar in order to implement these changes.  In a study, done by Chul-Yong Lee, he looks into exactly that:  The willingness of citizens to pay for renewable energy.  He compares a variety of different countries directly using the contingent valuation method, one of the most popular methods of survey regarding environmental policies.  The results of these surveys show that in the United States, the average citizen was willing to pay an additional $8.64 in order to implement renewable energy, the highest among the countries listed, which included Japan at $7.37 and the United Kingdom at $5.53 (Lee, 155).  This may not seem like much at first, but there are around 200 million taxpaying adults in the United States.  Multiply that by the results of the survey, and the United States government would have around 1.75 billion dollars in additional funds each year to implement these changes.  The average cost of a solar farm in the United States is 500 thousand dollars per acre, meaning that 3500 acres of land, excluding the cost of the land itself, could be used to produce clean energy.  

A key benefit of switching to renewable energy is in the form of maintenance costs.  When a coal or oil plant is initialized, there is not only the set up costs, but also the cost of obtaining new fuel and shipping it to the plant.  Renewables, however, only need to pay that initial set up cost.  The fuel does not need to be transported, because it’s abundant everywhere.  This means that the government or private company would benefit massively from opening a renewable energy farm just from this one benefit alone.  Their initial investment would be paid off quickly after the farm was opened, because their main expense at that point would be the salary of their employees.  

The culmination of these studies and articles have shown that renewables can, in fact, replace their pollution producing counterparts eventually.  The first step is policy.  If the government were to implement a policy similar to the carbon tax and give larger tax incentives for families that are willing to install their own solar panels, for example, then they would have more funds in which to invest more heavily into renewable energy.  Then, once the money was there, they would be able to open up more and more solar and wind farms in order to produce energy for the businesses and families that either can’t afford to or have chosen not to install their own solar panels.  This would be enabled to happen because of the increasingly efficient and affordable technology used to produce this clean energy.  As the gas and coal power plants started to shut down, the employees would be laid off, but the jobs lost would be replaced threefold by the solar and wind farms, allowing the citizens to benefit more and the investment to pay off.  The investment would be repaid in the form of even more jobs being created than are lost.  Also, the plants that are created wouldn’t need to fund their operation costs as much as non renewable plants, since the fuel source would be readily available every day at their location.  Not only can renewable energy plants replace non renewable plants, they most likely will in the near future, when the cost of implementation lowers further.
