Choosing Renewable Energy and Keeping Your Fuel Spending Local

There are many reasons now to choose renewable energy. It’s becoming far more widely available, both as a home supplement to the power grid as as the preferred method that the power company uses to create electricity. While it may be quite some time before we figure out how to use solar energy to run automobiles or mass transit, it is now very usable in just about every other application that currently uses polluting forms of energy.

In fact, alternative energy is just now benefiting from the last few decades of money and research that has gone into bringing these new technologies online. Some recent advances include solar harvesting paint and the ability to “print” solar material on flexible surfaces with a giant, high-speed “ink-jet” printer.

Renewable energy is an option for some municipal plan. Those living in the city can choose to purchase their power from wind and solar facilities. While such energy has been as much as two or three times as expensive in the past, renewable energy is now on par with petroleum energy choices. This trend is likely to continue as the price of oil goes up.

Biodiesel, for instance, is on par with the cost of petrol-diesel in many parts of the US and Canada. The same is true of heating oil. Ethanol does not use recycled products and can sometimes emit even more carbon than it’s petrol counterpart, though the price for this is also about on par with oil, now. As a result, older diesel vehicles are now being repaired and brought back onto the road with increasing frequency.

Water power form some of the large dam projects of the North American West are now being taken off line to deliver enough water downstream for migrating fish, and have proven less sound to the surrounding environment that the alternative energy sources that are just now becoming available.

At the same time as renewable energy has become widely available, other new technologies are helping conserve energy and better use that we are able to generate. Conserving heat energy and using energy efficient appliances has become an important part of a sustainable future.

Part of the embedded environmental cost of using foreign oil is the transport costs involved. By way of comparison, used oil that is recycled for use in automobiles can easily be produced in the local environment. New oil crop plantings can be part of a “green manure” program used by local, organic farmers.

This local bio-diesel can be used to power their own equipment and get crops to markets, such as the thousands of farmers’ markets that have sprung up across North America since it was made a priority in American Agriculture by the former Secretary of Agriculture, Dan Glickman. It can also be sold to nearby urban areas as another commodity crop. Bio-diesel can also be rendered into a usable form at home, eliminating the need for exotic chemical processes at far-off refineries.

Renewable energy has the advantage of being scalable and uniquely suited for distributed networking. It’s a surprisingly simple thing to hook up micro turbines or solar panels and begin supplying some of your own energy needs. Most such systems pay for themselves in the span of just a few years.

Another simple way to dramatically save on your heating bills is to use the power of the Earth itself by using passive geothermal heat pumps. These circulating water pipes are able to provide most of the heating and cooling required for homes in most areas. While some places have access to active geothermal energy, in the form of heated springs, a simple series of pipes laid out in just about any suburban backyard will have a significant impact on heating bills.

This type of passive energy is also apparent in the design of passive solar homes. Here, the energy of the sun is accumulated during the day and stored, often in water, to be released back into the environment at night. The high storage capacity of water makes it good at absorbing heat from the local environment. This same water heats up slowly, so is able to provide cooling during the day, too.

Renewable energy is a collection of passive and active ways of generating and conserving energy. This will save money, pollution and valuable resources that can best be used elsewhere. Reliance on local resources keeps more money at home and drastically reduces the true cost of imported items on the environment and pocketbooks.

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