In partnership with the Petaluma Educational Foundation, Simply Solar offered a Green Energy Scholarship to Petaluma High School students interested in renewable energy! Applicants from our local community were asked to write a short essay about how they think Renewable Energy Resources Will Shape Our Future. Read one of the essays by scholarship winner, Luke B. below.
The way we are consuming fossil fuels for electricity is tremendously unsustainable. Not only are they terrible for our atmosphere, but they are running out. At our consumption rate and with current extraction methods we have less than 60 years of fossil fuels left. We need to find more sustainable ways to generate power.
Installing solar panels is a good step almost anyone can take. I asked my parents to go solar many times, until I decided to do it myself. I designed a 1000w system which was more than enough to take my bedroom off the grid. I bought an inverter, deep cycle battery and a big thanks to Simply Solar, who was able to donate five used solar panels to my project. It feels great to understand exactly how my room gets power. Since I started keeping track I have produced over 160 KWh of electricity, enough to keep the lights on for a full year 24 hours a day.
There have been consistent advancements in solar and wind installations which is helpful, however they do not generate power consistently. On many afternoons during the spring and summer, solar alone can easily generate over 100% of our electricity needs in California, resulting in a surplus of solar energy. Yet hours later the California ISO needs to bring coal power plants online. This is because there is no infrastructure in place to store massive amounts of electricity. In order to make a truly sustainable grid, we need cheaper and more efficient ways to store large amounts of energy. There are not efficient storage technologies commercially available today. The Tesla power walls are a good start, but these lithium batteries are designed to be small and light which makes them expensive. When you need to store thousands of KWh of electricity at a time price, not portability, is the biggest factor.
What we need are larger capacity and cost effective batteries if we ever want to have our power come from renewable sources 100% of the time. Someday I would like to help change that by creating a battery that is affordable enough to be economically feasible and strong enough to power our future. Just like the silicon chip revolutionized computing, the solar cell will revolutionize energy.
There is no doubt that we will be relying on renewable energy sources in the future. Today we are at the tipping point where renewable energy sources are the same price or cheaper than fossil fuels. Renewable energy sources are primed to take over energy markets across the globe and I for one am excited about that.
How will renewable energy shape my future? I think it will be creating more jobs and innovators will be at the front line. This is truly something I am passionate about and I am looking forward to studying engineering and working toward developing these solutions in the future. I am excited to see this become a reality.
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