Clean Energy Technologies and Its Future

by Ambarish Verma President

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that well-designed federal and state incentives and investments in research and development have the potential to stimulate significant energy transformations. For instance, when in early '90s all the major federal government’s provided incentives for production shale gas as well as support for new drilling technologies, it laid the foundation for that industry’s dramatic rise; be it in their own countries or foreign, but today the same governments are supporting the expansion of these burgeoning markets such as the wind, solar and electric vehicles and are offering targeted support for research and development, most importantly due to increased pressure to control climate change.

Clean energy technology is any product or service that improves operational performance, productivity, has cost efficiency and extremely efficient energy consumption, minimal waste, and minimal environmental pollution. New market research suggests that by the end of 2017, global renewable generation capacity increased by 167 GW and reached 2,179 GW worldwide.

No matter how impressive the progress has been in developing clean energy technologies in recent years, the success stories are quite always overshadowed by surging demand for fossil fuels, which are outstripping deployment of clean energy technologies. Because nearly every aspect of our daily lives– heating, lighting, cooking, communications, transportation, commerce– depends on electricity.

Unfortunately, generating that electricity through the use of traditional fossil fuels is economically and environmentally very costly and a danger to public health, and many examples and instances have laid their evidences in terms of public health outcry such as the smog in Beijing or over polluted river such as Ganges in India. So, in terms of fossil fuels there is one such fossil fuel which is highly used- and it is coal and it has met over 47% of the global new electricity demand since the turn of the century, eclipsing clean energy efforts made over the same period of time, which include improved implementation of energy efficiency measures and rapid growth in the use of renewable energy sources.

Electricity generated with fossil fuels, such as oil, coal or natural gas, releases into our air and waterways harmful particles into our air, including carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, methane and mercury compounds, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Clean energy is heat and electricity produced from renewable sources, generating little or no pollution or emissions. These technologies provide clean, renewable sources of power from local sources of energy, which are sustainable over time rather than finite sources like traditional fossil fuels.

Almost all of the renewable energy comes either directly or indirectly from the sun. Sunlight, or solar energy, is used directly for heating and lighting homes and other buildings, for generating electricity, and for hot water heating, solar cooling, and a wide variety of other commercial and industrial uses.

To say that the future looks bleak due to the pollution and global warming, it will ultimately reach a point when civilization will be forced to research and develop alternative energy sources in order to survive, and for this development to get an extra push from consumers as well as governments; after seeing the energy crisis, many companies in the energy industry are inventing new ways to extract energy from different renewable sources and are introducing a new pathbreaking solution. Even though the rate of development is slow, but mainstream awareness and government pressure is growing and the future for clean energy technology certainly seems positive and hopeful.