The suppression of renewable energy

The oppression of renewable energy

With billions of dollars to spare, what is the oil company hiding? There is one infamous conspiracy theory about that may drive the entire petroleum energy business bankrupt. Does oil and gas companies really suppress? 

Here are some renewable energy options that I will be talking about.

Solar PV array 

We all know that there is no free lunch, green energy infrastructures are expensive, but is it worth it in the long run? Once you place a solar array on your roof, it will probably cost you a few thousand to start with, but after it you are generating power for free from the sun. A few thousand is a lot of money to start with, but after years of selling electricity back to the grid, it will pay itself.

The problem is that solar arrays usually are not as effective as people want it to be. Most commercial solar panels usually converts 15% of the energy it captures into electricity, some suggest that this could be doubled within 10 years. You also have to remember that the suns energy gets absorbed because of the earth atmosphere, that is why PV arrays thrive so good in satellites is because they get huge amount of power because there is no atmosphere to the photons.

Wind turbine
If you love scenery, You will absolutely hate wind turbines. They are huge, tall and is reported to kill birds. The problem is they rely too much on the wind being strong, and strong wind is also what people do not like. Unstable power output combined with destroying the scenery is not a very good thing when proposing to the public.








Fission reactor
The fear mongering with nuclear reactor is real. In the past 50 or so years, we've humans have had two class 7 nuclear accidents. The problem with such nuclear accident is that the fuel remains radioactive for a very long time and containment zone becomes a hassle to deal with.

Thorium has also been proposed and tested by researcher as a revolutionary new fuel for nuclear reactors. It is noted that Thorium is greener because a Thorium meltdown is not likely to cause major hassle such as Plutonium and Uranium based nuclear reactors. The best with Thorium is that it cannot be weaponized, and thus helping bringing peace.

Fusion reactor
This kind of energy has not yet been developed completely or tested on industrial scale. The US based company, Lockheed Martin suggest that they are able to produce one in some decades.

The problem is fusion reactor, is that the design has to endure temperatures of the surface of the sun for generating energy. If a breakthrough is found, then we might live in a post oil world where energy is not only cheap, but green and abundant. The fuel used in fusion reactors is hydrogen, one of the most abundant materials in the universe.

The sun is in fact one huge fusion reactor, it fuses hydrogen to helium and so on. We may find out answers from the nature itself.

???Fuel???
Dark matter? Plank energy? Anti-matter? Future technology in 500 years might be impressive to us as how technology now impresses the medieval civilization. This is only applies as long we have not killed our self with wars and petty politics. 

While the option for alternative energy is plentiful, not very many of them can compete with the oil market. The oil would have to be expensive and hard to extract before a significant progress in green energy is made.



Credits for pictures
"Westmill Solar 2" by MrRenewablesWestmill Solar Co-operativeNeil Maw - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Westmill_Solar_2.jpg#/media/File:Westmill_Solar_2.jpg


"Lamma wind turbine" by Patrickmak - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lamma_wind_turbine.jpg#/media/File:Lamma_wind_turbine.jpg

"Sun in X-Ray" by NASA Goddard Laboratory for Atmospheres - NASA Goddard Laboratory for Atmosphereshttp://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/rsd/images/yohkoh.htmlhttp://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/rsd/images/yohkoh_l.gif. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sun_in_X-Ray.png#/media/File:Sun_in_X-Ray.png