Going Green With Renewable Energy

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Steve Jones, and I'm going to tell you how to go green with renewable energy. Now, we know that at the moment we use these fossil fuels; oil, gas, coal, and nuclear fuel. We use them all to generate electricity for our houses, we use oil in our cars, petrol comes from oil. But, can we replace these things by using these renewable forms of energy; geothermal, biomass, hydro, wind, and solar energies? Well, the answer is, in general, yes. For example, biomass at the moment is being used to replace oil. Oil, petrol that we get from oil can be replaced by biodiesel, and biodiesel is a very important fuel. The one thing we have to remember is that biomass, which is plants, the energy comes from the sun, so we have to somehow resolve the use of biomass also with production of food. We can't turn every field into production for biomass. So, if we're going to produce diesel from biomass we have to think well, you know is this sustainable? Can I get enough food for the people to eat; otherwise, I'm actually defeating my purpose. However, for well over seventy, eighty years we've been using hydroelectric power; particularly on big rivers like those in America and in Russia, like the Colorado River has several large dams, and each of these produces hydroelectricity. A more modern way of doing it, of course, is to use wind power. Wind power is quite effective, especially near coasts where there is plenty of wind. Solar energy is generally used for smaller uses, because you can't actually produce large amounts of energy using solar energy unless you have very large arrays of solar panels. Geothermal energy; well, you're lucky if you've got a geothermal power plant in your area. But if there's no geothermal activity; Iceland for example is a good place where there is geothermal activity, then if you haven't got that on your doorstep you're not going to be using that. But this is how we can go green with thermal and all of these forms of renewable energy."