Advantages And Disadvantages Of Renewable Energies - Essay

During the last two decades one of the main concerns of many people and governments is the supply of energy for different purposes such as producing electricity. Two main issues lead them to think about this problem deeply. First of all the environmental problems such as carbon dioxide emission and also the shortage of fossil fuels for generating electricity. Therefore many countries decided to find alternatives which are accessible or easy to access and they cannot harm the environment. Some of alternatives are wind, Tidal, nuclear and solar energy. By looking generally to alternatives it can be realized that each one has its own advantages and disadvantages. Currently two main sources which are really important among governments and they have invested on them is solar and nuclear power for producing electricity. Nuclear power can be defined as one kind of energy which can produce through some chemical reactions between the atoms of the element. Nowadays scientists have found some methods to use the energy which is release from the reactions among atoms. The other kind of energy source is solar energy which is releasing from the rays of sun. Governments have decided to use these kinds of renewable energy sources to overcome the problem of energy shortage. Some countries have developed in these two kinds of energy source industries. However in each area some people are for and some of them are against this kind of producing energies.

One of the common methods of producing electricity in recent years was using fossil fuel energy for spinning the turbines to produce electricity; however scientists found a method of capturing sunlight energy and heating to transfer this energy into turbine to spin them and produce a sustainable energy form without any environmental impact. Generally the main process of this method is using some kinds of mirrors in different shapes which are mostly having u shape or they are like a dish. Through this mirrors in these plants they concentrate the sun rays and convert it into heat energy for boiling water. After boiling water the steam which is produced due to heating energy from the effect of sun light the conventional turbines will spine and through complicated systems produce electricity.

One of the main and biggest projects related to solar power is in California in the united stated. This project has been held between the areas Kramer junction and Harper lake in California. This solar plant can produce 150 megawatts of electricity. It can cover 1500 acres in the desert. In this project more than 900,000 mirrors have been used to capture sun light. Through this project the amount of carbon dioxide emission can decrease significantly in comparison to fossil fuels carbon dioxide emission. Because 3800 tons of carbon dioxide used to produce by fossil fuels.

One of the European countries which are really concern about energy efficiency is Spain. The government has invested significantly due to the future and problems related to energy sources such as shortage and pollution of other sources. They have found this kind of energy adequate as an alternative. Trujillo solar project which is started on the year 2006 and finished on 2007 has some advantages in terms of electricity generation for many homes and also decreasing carbon dioxide emission. The total output of this project which might be introduced is 20 megawatts. The method which is used to generate electricity from sunlight in this project is photovoltaics. This project has been designed and developed by power light corporation. In this project they can cover about 100 hectars.The name of the project is Magascona. The calculations from the company can illustrate that the mentioned power plant can supply electricity for 20,000 homes. Moreover it can prevent from carbon dioxide emission annually by about 42,000 tons.

A kind of renewable kinds of energy which is really controversial its future and its efficiency is nuclear power. In general nuclear energy is a kind of energy which is release from the atom of some elements through some reactions. This kind of energy sometimes can produce by doing some controllable processes to use this energy and convert the nuclear power to electricity. This method of producing electricity has its own advantages and disadvantages. Although some people are concern about its disadvantages but it might be a good alternative as response to the shortage of energy in future. Also there are different comparison between using nuclear power and fossil fuels for generating electricity. The general concept of generating of electricity from nuclear power can be explained through this way. In the first stage the Uranium element which is radioactive element should be extract from the mines. After that Uranium should be fed to the nuclear power plant as a main fuel for reactors. In power plants by using controllable reactions which can be called fission reaction an intense amount of heat will produce. The purpose of this intense amount of energy is to vaporise the water and use the resulted steam for spinning the turbines. The electricity which is produced by turbines will feed the electricity into electricity greed. In the last stage they will use this electricity for various purposes such as industry and homes.

Although this method of producing electricity could be an alternative for the future. but there are many arguments for and against investment on nuclear power plants. Currently there are different countries that are invested on this industry such as France and USA. It might be claimed that France is the pioneer of producing electricity from nuclear power by having about 59 nuclear power plants. Generally the amount of electricity which is generated in this country is about 540.6 Tera watt hour and it is a huge amount of electricity. Currently France is the largest exporter of electricity from nuclear power. However the amount of investment in nuclear power plant is quite allotrope of the main nuclear power plants which was carried out in 1991 and 1993 was CIVAUX .This power plant has two phases. The first phase was built in 1991 and the other one built two years later. Both phases completed in 1999 and the government invested about 4.1 billion dollars on this project. There are a significant issue in this project. At the time of testing this nuclear power plant before putting the electricity into the grid the engineers found out a leak from primary coolant, therefore they decided to shut down the reactor and repair the problem. Because, as some people might know, if any problem occurs during any reaction in these nuclear plants sometimes some disasters might occur, such as explosions. Unfortunately the amount of electricity which was produced in proportion to the time and investment on this project was not worth very much. The CIVAUX project work out 1,349 kwe and it was much lower amount among the other foreign projects.By comparison this project and the amount of energy which is produce by fossil fuels was not a successful project.By comparison this nuclear project to the one fossil fuel project for producing energy they have almost the same amount of electricity production.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Limitations

Civaux 1-2

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=nuclear-cannot-solve-climate-change