HOW ENERGY RESOURCES CAME INTO THE EXISTENCE?
The first form of energy technology probably was fire, which produced heat and the early man used it for cooking and heating.
The burning of wood for fire was then replaced by coal.
Coal fueled the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th Century.
The twentieth century saw a rapid twenty fold increase in the use of fossil fuels.
With the advent of the automobile, airplanes and the spreading use of electricity, oil became the dominant fuel during the 20th century.
But after the oil shocks of 1973 (Arab oil embargo when the oil supplying nations refused to supply oil to the US) and 1979 (Iranian revolution leading to strikes resulting in reduction of oil extraction), during which the price of oil increased from 5 to 45 US Dollars per barrel, there was a shift away from oil dependency.
This led to increased exploration and use of several alternate sources of energy.
There was an effort to increase energy efficiency.
Example, Japan made improvements and now has the highest energy efficiency in the world.
Despite advances in efficiency and sustainability, of all the energy created since the industrial revolution, more than half has been consumed in the last two decades.
In 2009, world energy consumption decreased for the first time in 30 years as a result of the financial and economic crisis. But overall the energy needs are only expanding and the sources of energy are getting exhausted at a very fast
GROWING ENERGY NEEDS
All development activities are directly or indirectly dependent upon energy.
Agriculture, industry, mining, transportation, lighting, cooling and heating in buildings all need energy.
Developed countries constitute 5% of the world’s population but consume 1/4th of global energy resources.
A person in a rich country consumes almost as much as energy in a single day as one person does in a whole year in a poor Country.
Thus, improved standard of living , change in lifestyle apart from population growth is putting stress on our conventional sources of energy like fossil fuels which are not going to last for many more years.
And so we have been looking at alternate sources of energy to take the stress off the conventional sources and to supply the ever increasing energy demands without running out. For this we require renewable sources of energy, i.e. which can be generated continuously in nature and are inexhaustible as compared to non-renewable resources like fossil fuels which are accumulated in nature over a long span of time and cannot be quickly replenished when exhausted.
Comments
Post a Comment