Modern Energy: Sources, Limits, and Possibilities

Our current energy sources are highly practical, yet each comes with its own limitations. Explore with me these systems, their flaws, and some brilliant ideas that haven’t succeeded yet — but could reshape our future. Read to discover the untold.

This blog is the sequel to Energy: Its Types and Generation.

Introduction

Welcome to the second segment of my train of blogs on the topic ‘Energy’, yes, that’s it, as I said in my last blog, it will be the hard stuff in simple language, and before you say that the topic energy is a very basic topic…… think again because we are moving forward to our *current times. In this blog, we will be learning about how we generate energy today, what their advantages are, and possibly why our *current methods are not perfect.

Recap

In my last blog, we got to know what the most commonly known forms of energy are (I am NOT explaining them here; go read it if you haven’t yet). And how its usage and generation evolved from the caveman Era all the way up to a little before what we have today. And as I said earlier, I will be telling you what we have today, so that you can watch MrBeast commit the worst form of capitalism…… uhh… I don’t think I should have said that. Anyways, let’s start!

Today’s energy

1. The most dominant form of energy is taken from fossil fuels. Now, you may ask what fossil fuels are- they are ‘fossil’ fuels…. Okay… jokes aside, fossil fuels are the fuels that come from fossils, like coal, natural gas, and petroleum. Well, they may not seem like fossil fuels to you, but they are. Coal is formed from the old woody plants (they became woody due to a chemical called lignin in them), and the lignin that they had in them wasn’t edible for the bacteria in the soil of that time, so the dead plants sank deeper and deeper, accumulating carbon until eventually, it became coal. Depending on how much time they were in the soil, they formed 4 broad categories of coal:

a. Peat: It is considered a precursor or predecessor to coal by some; it is a fibrous material having around 20% carbon content. b. Lignite: This is known as the actual first stage of coal, having about 25-35% carbon content, it has high moisture and is also soft. It is also known as brown coal. It’s primarily used for electricity generation. c. Bituminous: It is the most common type of coal for electricity generation and steel manufacturing. It has about 60-80% carbon content. It’s typically dull black. It’s also known as soft coal. d. Anthracite: It is the hardest type of coal, having up to 95% carbon content, giving the most heat output. It is almost jet black.

● Coal is commonly used in thermal coal-power plants to heat water into steam and rotate a turbine to generate electricity. Petroleum gives petrol, diesel, kerosene, and a few other things that are used in things like lubricants, construction, etc. Natural gas can be compressed and put into cylinders, to become what we call those cylinders as CNG (compressed natural gas). These fuels provide 70-80% of the whole world’s energy. However, they cause a lot of air pollution and CO2 emissions, so…. We gotta have something environmentally friendly

rbnenergy.com

1. The next one is nuclear energy. As I explained in my last blog, they work using the principle of nuclear fission. It is a very efficient method of energy generation, generating a huge amount of energy from a small amount of fuel. The major disadvantage of this method is that the radioactive waste (A radioactive substance is a thing that has unstable atoms that naturally break down and release energy in the form of either alpha, beta, or gamma particles to become stable. It is dangerous when there is a large exposure, which can damage the environment and even kill people, because what it produces is extremely hard to get rid of.
2. Next up on the list, we have hydropower (hydro - water). Here, we use flowing water to spin turbines that generate electricity. This is a very stable and reliable method of utilising energy, and since it’s renewable, our environment is not harmed. It is the form of energy that requires the least amount of knowledge and hard work (excluding the construction of dams) to set up(in my opinion) compared to the others. E.g., A lot of villages in Kashmir get their electricity from hydropower. Its main disadvantage is that the construction of dams (they are large open containers that accumulate water to be passed through a small tunnel in which the turbine is situated to generate electricity), which is required for this to work efficiently, destroys many ecosystems.
3. Another very known form of energy generation is solar energy. Apparatus named solar panels are used to convert sunlight into electricity. It is a very clean way of generating electricity, which, with our growing knowledge, is becoming cheaper faster. The process is simple(assuming no better solar panels are invented)- more solar panels - more electricity, bigger solar panels - more electricity, but more & bigger solar panels - more land required. The only downsides are that they won’t work in the night and cloudy weather, and they need storage (batteries).

WhispersPsst! Hey! You want to know how solar panels work, well, it won’t be like last time. My fourth segment on this topic will be on solar panels. So tag along!

1. Now, this one will be the last one I will be talking about in “Today’s Energy”. It’s wind energy. Simply, the winds move a turbine put high up on a pole(it’s called a windmill)…. Yeah, that is how it all works. The good things about it are that it’s clean and renewable. However, it faces a major downside that it is not very efficient, as winds are inconsistent and the windmills require high maintenance.

I think that you have learnt a lot today, and it may have felt a bit less, or you may not have learnt as much as yesterday, but trust me, before going to the complex topics, we need to know what’s before them, and this is just the buildup.

Brilliant ideas that didn’t work

Whispers… again, for some reason, Ay, you didn’t see this in the introduction, well, guess what, this is a bonus for you, so appreciate it, and now make sure to read my next blog.

Now for the part that we have all been waiting for, the key innovations or ideas that would have been so helpful in the battle to generate energy that we wouldn’t even have to care about this topic for about a century, but due to our knowledge being too limited for now, they are no closer than impossible. Here they are:

1. Space-based solar power: This was an extremely innovative idea, which included putting a satellite with solar panels into space and transmitting the energy using microwaves to the Earth for usage. This has a MASSIVE energy potential and would solve the major problem of solar panels, which wouldn’t work in cloudy weather or at night. But it failed because it was too expensive, and also due to the fact that we don’t have much knowledge about transmitting energy in the form of microwaves.

​www.allaboutcircuits.com​

1. Ocean-thermal energy conversion: It was a great idea to use the temperature difference between warm surface water and cold deep water. It was brilliant because the energy produced by it would be clean, renewable, and constant; however, it failed because the infrastructure for it was too costly, and it wasn’t efficient enough.

By www.genitronsviluppo.com​

1. Nuclear fusion: This was the idea which was the opposite to nuclear fission, this method includes combining two lighter atoms to make a heavier atom, also giving a heck load of energy, but unlike nuclear fission, it didn’t produce any radioactive waste, which would be a win-win situation if it didn’t require around 100 million °C of temperature like in the sun and it generates hard to control plasma. Despite these challenges, scientists are coming very close to being able to do this.
2. Antimatter energy: This method of energy generation includes the usage of antimatter, which, in simple words is the mirror version of matter, like everything is composed of atoms, which are made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons. An atom’s antimatter counterpart has the same parts, but of opposite charge (electron - positron, proton - antiproton, neutron - antineutron).

Now, the interesting part is that when matter and antimatter come together, they destroy each other instantly (called annihilation) and….. boom! Pure energy is released, like light. In the image shown above, quarks are basically balls that make up protons and neutrons, and these up quarks and down quarks are basically “flavours” which give the protons and neutrons their charge. Up quarks give a slight positive charge, and down quarks give a slight negative charge. There are 4 more types, which are heavier and more unstable, and also not found in many normal atoms, only in special experiments. Maybe one day we will get there. Coming back to the topic of energy, it failed simply because it was extremely expensive and the energy was hard to store, as it would annihilate itself instantly. Now on to our last one.

​www.civilsdaily.com, this link is for the first image. www.astronomy.com, this is for the second image.

1. Geothermal everywhere: This method is a really clever one that includes the pumping of superhot fluid from under the surface to rotate a turbine, and that superheated fluid is then cooled and circulated back into the ground. This idea would give constant and clean energy….. However, deep drilling(5-10km underground) is extremely expensive and very difficult, and it also increases the risk of earthquakes.

Conclusion

It seems like you made it to the end of this blog, congrats! I won’t say much mainly cuz I have already said too much. To recap, our current forms of energy generation…… hold on… I may clarify one thing (if you have a doubt that is) that energy can’t be generated, every time I say that energy is generated, I mean that the energy in said method is converted into the form that we use, which is electricity….

Remember that we can’t generate anything; we only convert what exists.