Energy Sources of the Future - Essay Example

 Wilder schemes involve sky-high wind turbines or antimatter engines” (Than, 2005). The main sources of energy in the future include but are not limited to wind energy and solar energy.

However, numerous challenges lie in the utilization of these sources in the future. The Guinness Atkinson Alternative Energy Fund’s co-manager Edward Guinness says that although wind energy’s use is growing almost 30 percent per year, the price of energy generated by the wind is competitive with the price of fossil fuels (Eaves, 2007). Rapid growth in the production and use of solar power is also expected shortly. Slightly more than 0.1 percent of the total energy in the world is derived from solar power through photovoltaic cells.

According to Edward Guinness, use of the solar power can grow to more than 10 percent in the next two to three decades with the improvement of the manufacturing processes (Eaves, 2007). However, “[t]here are financial, political, and technical pressures as well as time constraints that will force tough choices” (Grunwald, 2009). Therefore, it would take some time for the use of alternative sources of energy to outperform that of fossil fuels. The future of energy is more about how than what.

“I think the things that would blow us away if we could jump forward 20 years would not be the giant fields of windmills, but the 1,000 changes in daily life that have taken place to save energy” (Steffen cited in Eaves, 2007). In the future, the sources of power are expected to get closer to the home. The changes would extend beyond the use of low-energy light bulbs. People would rely more on local energy particularly where the places have an abundance of wind, sunshine, and rivers.

With the production of energy at the domestic level, there would be a flow of energy back and forth within the small infrastructure in the form of power grids that would supply energy two-way i.e. both to and from the homes. The alternative sources of energy have not been utilized to the full extent on the Earth to date fundamentally because their supply and use have been expensive and the supply has not met the demands. Although the use of fossil fuels has many negative effects on the environment, they prove more cost-effective and are abundant and easily retrievable as compared to such other sources of energy as wind or solar energy.

According to the research conducted by Global Data, “the cost of generating clean energy like solar power is coming increasingly closer to the cost of generating energy from traditional, non-renewable sources” (Energy Tribune, 2012). Given this, it remains more convenient to use fossil fuels since their sources and means of exploration are rampant and omnipresent, unlike solar energy.