Renewable energy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Renewable energy - Essay Example newable energy sources is that the energy sources like natural gas, coal, and oil have no permanent reservoirs and they will be exhausted at some time in future. Therefore, the world has turned to renewable energy sources as alternatives to traditional sources of energy (Hick, n.d.). Renewable energy sources are some of the very beneficial energy sources for a country. Some of the most considerable advantages of renewable energy include sustainability, less maintenance requirement, reduced cost of operations, and increased economic benefits. These advantages also make renewable energy sources very critical for the economic stability of a country. These resources not only bring economic benefits, but also they put a very minimal impact on the environment because of generation of very little amount of waste products. No polluting emissions and repeated use without depletion are also two of the most considerable advantages of renewable energy. Apart from the advantages, there also exist some disadvantages of renewable energy. However, the number of disadvantages is very less as compared to the advantages. Some of the disadvantages include difficulty in generating electricity quantities equivalent to fossil fuel generated electricity and unreliability under certain conditions. Let us now discuss some of the widely used sources of renewable energy in order to get a clear picture of their advantages and disadvantages. There are six major types of renewable energy sources, which include hydropower energy source, wind energy source, solar energy source, geothermal energy source, biomass energy source, and nuclear power. Let us discuss all of them in some detail. Hydropower energy source is the most recent invention in renewable energy. Hydropower is the largest source of renewable energy, which has the generating capacity of 77,000 Megawatts (Conlan, 2009). It is due to the scarcity and rising prices of oil and gas that a large number of developed countries are putting