Green technology

Growing concerns about the world reaching peak oil production, as well as the environmental impact of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, have prompted many individuals and industries to look toward green technologies. In 2008, worldwide investments in renewable energy technologies surpassed fossil fuel technology investments for the first time. At the same time, more environmentally friendly technologies have been decreasing in price, making them more desirable to consumers.

For several decades, scientists and environmentalists have issued warnings about the way the global climate has been changing since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. Since that time, more and more fossil-based fuels like coal and oil have been burned to produce the goods and services people expect to have in the modern world. Although the climate has always changed due to natural phenomena like plate tectonics, solar radiation, and volcanic eruptions, the burning of fossil fuels over the last few centuries has also greatly contributed to climate change. Scientists and environmentalists argue that technology must be improved to be less wasteful, more efficient, and less harmful to the environment. They believe the way to do this is to invest in renewable energy sources that would ultimately end the dependence on fossil-based fuels. Business leaders have also begun investing in green technologies, as many of them believe that the world is entering a period in which peak oil production—the point at which oil extraction would hit its height before going into permanent decline— is approaching, and these alternative energy technologies are becoming cheaper, more practical, and necessary.

Advances in Renewable Energy

Renewable energy is energy that is derived from natural resources such as sunlight, geothermal heat, wind, and water. Unlike energy produced from the burning of fossil fuels, which is finite because those sources will ultimately be depleted, energy from natural resources is continually replenished. Although the technology to harness renewable energy has been around for decades (as with solar panels) or even centuries (as with wind or hydropower), advances in renewable energy technology in the first decade of the twenty-first century allowed them to be seen as a more viable alternative to burning oil or gas. Specific fields that have seen considerable technological advancement include solar energy, wind energy, biomass power, biofuels, geothermal power, and ocean tidal power.

For several decades, solar power, harnessed by solar panels on rooftops, was popularly seen as being both inefficient and very expensive, despite the nearly limitless energy resource the sun provides. For many years, most solar panels were made of the chemical element silicon, but as demand for silicon has increased, alternatives have been sought. In the early twenty-first century, scientists at Ben-Gurion University in Israel developed solar cells composed of gallium arsenide, a compound used in numerous electronic products that has also proven to be more efficient in collecting solar energy. Another advancement in solar energy is the development of spherical solar cells, which, unlike their rectangular predecessors, allow sunlight to be collected from every angle. Finally, the creation of paint-on solar cells, which can be applied to flexible plastic sheets, enables researchers to collect solar energy from areas and surfaces previously unimagined.

Wind energy is among the most popular green energy technologies in the United States. In 2000, total wind energy generation was about 6 billion kilowatthours (kWh); it increased to about 434 billion kWh in 2022. Concerns about the growing chains of giant wind farms, which are composed of turbines that environmental groups accuse of killing large numbers of birds and bats, prompted researchers to produce better wind collectors, including turbines on higher towers that would both increase their output and boost efficiency by 20 percent. Another development is the bladeless turbine, based on a 1913 patent by famed inventor Nicola Tesla, which has its complete machinery hidden inside its housing and works almost silently via a turbine of rotating metal plates supported by magnetic bearings.

Unlike wind energy, which is becoming cheaper as the technology improves, biomass power has great promise but is still more costly than drilling for oil. Biomass power is clean energy produced from burning algae, a single-celled organism composed of 50 percent oil. However, burning algae does not add the greenhouse gas carbon to the air because it takes the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere as it burns through photosynthesis, the process that converts light energy into chemical energy.

Biofuel, notably ethanol created from crops like sugarcane and corn, became another popular green energy in the 2000s. These prototype biofuels proved less than ideal because they raised the prices of food products while at the same time competing ineffectively against traditional gasoline. Inedible crops like jatropha oil and switchgrass have shown more potential, as they both are not competitive with food products and can compete financially with gasoline, provided the infrastructure and technology are in place. Ethanol has also been produced from the inedible byproducts of food crops.

Geothermal power is power derived from Earth’s heat. Researchers believe that this source of energy has enormous potential. The natural gas industry has learned how to extract gas from remote places through a combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking), a process that involves drilling a hole, pressuring the hole, and pumping water and chemicals into the hole to release the gas. Researchers believe a process known as enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) would be able to extract the earth’s heat in a similar manner by pumping cold water down into hot rock and allowing it to heat up underground. One estimate from a 2006 report funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) concluded that EGS could provide the country with its total yearly energy use 140,000 times over. The DOE has funded three EGS demonstration sites in Utah, Nevada, and California.

Like geothermal power, ocean tidal power boasts enormous potential, particularly in the United States where the areas off the northeastern Atlantic Ocean and the northwestern Pacific Ocean are ripe for development. The process involves harnessing the energy produced from the tidal differences between the daily periods of low and high each day. In order for this process to work most effectively, there must be a difference of sixteen feet between low and high tide, but there are about forty such sites on Earth where ocean tidal power could be employed. Several countries, including Canada, South Korea, and France have working tidal power stations.

Popular Commercial Products

Perhaps the greatest boon to green technology has come through the growing popularity of more environmentally friendly products, most notably hybrid gas and electric cars that burn less gasoline and compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), which are more energy efficient than their incandescent counterparts. Hybrid cars received a huge boost in 2000 when Toyota began selling the Prius, the world’s first mass-produced hybrid vehicle. Sold in more than seventy nations, it gained great popularity in both the United States and Japan. By 2008, more than one million Priuses had been sold and millions more have been sold since that time. The success of this vehicle was considered a watershed moment in the automobile industry, with every major manufacturer producing its own variant of the hybrid car. Some of the most notable hybrids include the Chevy Volt, the Ford Fusion Hybrid and the Toyota Camry Hybrid, among others. Each of these vehicles boasts excellent fuel economy through electric batteries that minimize the amount of gasoline needed to run it. The Nissan LEAF, which debuted in 2010, was the first commercially available all-electric, zero-tailpipe emissions car.

Compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs have been around since the 1890s, almost as long as the incandescent variety, but it was not until the last decade that they began to become competitive. Although the typical CFL uses approximately 75 to 80 percent less energy than an incandescent bulb, they were not widely used by consumers for a number of reasons: they were more expensive than incandescent bulbs, could not be used with a dimmer, tended to flicker when warming up, and emitted a harsher, less warm light. Improvements in the technology that have eliminated many of these concerns, combined with the willingness of bulb manufacturers to ramp up production of CFLs, has lowered their costs somewhat and made them more appealing to consumers. Although CFLs remain more costly than incandescent bulbs, their energy efficiency provides greater savings on electric bills over the life of the bulbs, which has made individuals, companies, and even governments take a second look at them. For example, Australia, Canada, and the European Union began the process of banning the sale of incandescent bulbs in 2009. Argentina and Russia began phasing them out in 2012, and the United States, Mexico, Canada, South Korea, and Malaysia followed suit in 2014.

Many researchers foresee a day on the horizon when CFLs are replaced with light emitting diodes (LEDs), which, unlike fluorescent and incandescent bulbs, do not release some of their energy as heat. CFLs and LEDs both use 75 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs, but LEDs are more efficient. Furthermore, CFLs contain about 4 milligrams of mercury, a toxin that can harm the environment if not disposed of properly. Some states have banned CFLs as of 2024 and more were considering such bans. Production of CFLs in Europe ended permanently in August 2023.

Impact

Many energy industry observers see green technology as a growing part of the global economy, not as a fad that may be abandoned at some point in the future. According to the International Energy Agency, power capacity from renewable energy sources came to 280,000 megawatts in 2008, three times what nuclear power plants in the United States were generating in the same year. As of 2019, roughly 11.2 percent of global energy consumption was derived from renewable energy resources and this number is expected to grow as more nations seek to become greener. Concerns about reaching peak oil and fears over climate change are prompting governments worldwide to find alternative sources of energy and more efficient ways to use the traditional fuel sources they currently employ.

The future of green technology will depend as much on the willingness of governments and corporations to invest in it, as it does on consumers’ desire to use the goods that derive from it in their homes. The growing calls for more efficient cars, lighting, and other power-driven goods, both in the United States and abroad, suggests that average people are willing to make the change to green technology, provided there is economic incentive for them to do so. Surveys have found that younger generations are more interested than older people in using renewable energy because of their concerns about climate change.

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