What Is the Best Renewable Energy Source? | Clean Power

In this video I'm going to show you which renewable energy strategy is the best to power our future. Currently no one is making it clear which one of the renewable energy sources we should be using. Is it biofuel? Wind turbines? Waste to energy? Nuclear? Or solar panel farms? Having all of these options creates the question, how should we power our future? For the last 300 years we have been relying on burning fossil fuels to provide us with energy. If we continue to use fossil fuels we'd only have 115 years left of coal, and only 50 years of natural gas and oil. Coal factories like this one have been pumping millions of tons of CO2 into our atmosphere, therefore we must transfer over to renewable energy sources. All renewable energy sources have their pros and cons, so I'm going to show you exactly which ones we should choose to power our future. Wind turbines like this one make up 18.8% of Europe's electricity and only 4.8% of the world's. There is not always the same amount of wind, however they are put in locations that are particularly windy, particularly offshore. Over in Copenhagen they have surrounded their coastline with wind turbines, and in Denmark it's over 41% of their electricity production. They are very expensive to install, but once they're up and running there are very little maintenance costs. The only carbon that they use is in the production and the transportation. Wind turbines have been said to be noisy, but listen, it's not making any noise. Some people say they're ugly, but wouldn't you rather this, than this? Some even say that wind turbines create deforestation, but just don't put them where the trees are. The disadvantage of wind turbines is that they have to be put in remote locations, so trying to get the power into a busy city might be a struggle. This is one of the huge benefits of solar energy, as it can be put directly in the city. Solar panels could be placed on the side of a building, like this one in Barcelona, or they could wrap the entire building, such as this school we visited in Copenhagen. This is only powering the buildings which have the solar panels on, but there are solar farms which can produce a large amount of energy. A football field of solar panels can produce enough electricity in a year to power 238 homes. To put this into comparison with other energy sources, this wind turbine creates enough electricity to power 1,500 homes, therefore you would need over six football fields of solar panels to create the same amount of energy. However, this math is based on the solar potential in London. If we looked at hotter cities, the amount of space would be considerably smaller, as they receive far more solar energy. However, space requirements may be the reason why solar power is only 3% of the world's energy production, as we require the land near our cities for agriculture. Biofuel and waste energy plants are both great ways of supplementing our energy supply, and you can hear more about them from the examples I visited in the green buildings video. Now the most controversial source of power is nuclear energy, but in all honesty, I'm a big supporter of it. It gets a bad press as people are terrified of it going wrong, however I like to think of it like flying on a plane. It's the safest form of travel, but when something does go wrong, you are sure to hear about it on the news. There are two types of nuclear energy, fission, which we are currently using, and fusion, which we are trying to develop. Fusion is the process of smashing hydrogen atoms against each other, which is what is happening in our sun. If we can solve this, then we should solve all our worries, as it will produce so much energy. However, the current tests we are running are using more energy to get the process started than the actual energy they are creating. Fission is the process which we are currently using, and involves splitting heavy elements like uranium. Unfortunately, this can't be classed as renewable energy, as we are still using resources. We only have 230 years left of uranium in the ground, unless we start extracting from the small concentration which is in our seawater. We are developing fission reactions which use other heavy elements such as thorium, however ultimately our best option is to figure out the process of fusion, so that we never have to worry about energy insecurity again. Does this mean we don't need renewable energies like wind and solar? We definitely need them, as we don't know if we will ever solve fusion, and we require a wide range of energy sources, as we can't rely just on one. For example, relying on purely solar power would mean there would be no energy production during the night, and relying on just wind power would mean there would be little energy when the wind levels are low. Therefore, the best renewable energy is, well, all of them together. We must transfer over to renewable energy sources as soon as we possibly can. Nuclear energy plants take long periods to be constructed, whereas solar panels and wind turbines can be implemented right now. So to answer the question, how should we power our future? The answer is pretty simple, it's just renewable energy. But my personal favourite has to be wind, due to the amount of energy it can create within such a small footprint. Thank you for watching, please press that subscribe button and join me as we work out how we save earth. I will see you in the next video.