Unlimited and Free Clean Energy
-- posted August 2015 --
Today’s blog is about an article recently posted in Washington Post entitled ‘The coming era of unlimited and free clean energy’.
The author, Vivek Wadhwa, predicts that the innovations in the domain of clean energy, encompassing solar, wind, biomass, thermal, and tidal energy, will lead to an era of unlimited and free clean energy, and will eliminate the fossil fuels based energy.
For instance, solar energy today supplies about 1% of the total power needs. Considering the current trend of doubling the solar-obtained power every 2 years, in about 14 years it would supply 100% of the energy need in the world. If the increasing demand for energy in the developing countries in the future is taken into consideration, the predicted period can be approximated to about 20 years from now. And even in that case, only a tiny fraction of the total solar energy (0.0001%) that falls on Earth will be used.
Obviously, the provision of free energy will be highly beneficial for humanity. Challenges may emerge in ensuring that the energy is indeed free and accessible to everyone, by imposing efficient regulations for its use by governmental’ slow administrative machineries, and in making sure that it is not abused by the powerful corporations, but rather is used for improving the lives of the poorest among us.
Image source: http://www.theglobalalliance.org/renewable-energy-sources/