Ethical Energy Sources
- Solar: There are multiple ways of using the sun to produce heat and energy ethically.
Passive Solar – One of the most natural ways is to let the sun shine through your windows into your home and let it heat your house. Obviously, this form of heat produces no pollution.
Solar Hot Water – Another form of solar energy that produces hot water both for bathing and for heating your home is through solar panels that heat water. This is a cost effective, although, a more complex way than passive solar to save a significant amount of energy for heating your house and your hot water. It has been around for a long time and is very cost effective in sunnier climates.
Solar Photovoltaic (PV) – Solar power can be used to generate electricity with photovoltaic cells. These can be used on a single house or can be used by the utility company to generate massive amounts of electricity.
- Wind: You can use the wind to produce electricity. The wind is free, but you have to build a wind generator and tower to capture the wind. This form of energy can be used at an individual home with a small generator or utility companies can build large farms of wind generators to produce electricity. The U.S., as well as many other countries, has a major resource of this free wind to produce electricity and many wind generators are already producing significant amounts of electricity.
- Hydro: Hydroelectric power has been used for many years to produce electricity. There are many large dams already in existence that produce large amounts of electricity. Dams can cause ecological issues, but the flowing water is a low cost way to produce electricity.
- Geothermal: There are 2 types of geothermal energy we are referring to here.
Heat Pumps – The first is what you usually hear about where you use the heat from the earth a few feet below ground to run a heat pump. This is a more efficient way to produce heat for your home and is better than most ways to produce heat, but can be expensive to install.
Geothermal Heat – There is another form of geothermal energy that may have more potential than solar and wind, but you don’t hear much about it. We’re talking about heat that is found a couple of miles below the surface of the earth where the temperature is several hundred degrees. That heat can be used to directly produce electricity by utility companies. This is already used in places like Iceland where the geothermal heat is near the surface, but with drilling technology that already exists; this form of energy can be used throughout the world and will probably become a major factor in producing electricity in the next 20 years.
