Making Renewable Energy Affordable

The recent push towards finding more efficient renewable energy sources, has had interesting repercussions on international markets. According to the experts at RAND Corporation, a nonprofit institution which is designed to improve policies and decisionmaking through research and analysis, there is a great deal of needed technological advances, in order to make renewable energy more affordable. If the United States wants to produce one fourth of it’s electricity and motor fuel from renewable resources by 2025, without having prices soar, new advances in technology are a must- according to a study issued by the RAND Corporation.

The Energy and Economic Development program, of RAND Corporation, has provided a “snapshot” of our nation’s possible energy use, if the US was able to make one fourth of its energy for electricity and fuel for vehicles from renewable sources. According to this “snapshot”, biomass resources and wind power will have the strongest and most influential impact towards reaching aimed goals.

In addition to the RAND Corporation involvement, the Energy Future Coalition a nonprofit environmental organization, has also played a factor in these studies. This organization has pushed RAND to create an assessment of the economic and other impacts of accomplishing the hoped goal. Thus, RAND’s study has taken technological and economic factors into consideration when judging the cost of using both renewable energy and nonrenewable fossil fuels.

It is an important time for such a report to come out, especially with higher fuel prices and concerns about global warming on the rise. It is clear that by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources, carbon dioxide emissions will lessen. This is significant especially when considering how strongly these emissions affect global warming.

At this time, renewable energy is only 9.5 % of the total energy used in the US electricity supply and 1.6 % of the total used in the fuel supply of vehicles.

Renewable energy sources include: wind, solar and hydropower, in addition to the burning of agricultural waste.

Biomass energy souces include: stalks from food crops, wood material and grasses, which can be turned into ethanol or gasoline.

Of course, new energy sources are only half of the equation. The other half is using energy wisely through energy conservation and energy efficiency programs. Here is where Starry Night Lights really shines Our night sky friendly outdoor lighting aims light where it’s needed, on the ground.  By preventing light from shining up into the night sky, our fixtures can often used 1/2 the energy of non-sky friendly outdoor lighting. This saves a considerable amount of energy and helps to reduce light pollution in our communities.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Starry Night Lights, energy star, environment, global warming, green building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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