Our planet enjoys resources that replenish constantly, including sunlight,wind, moving water, and geothermal heat. We need energy for our everyday lives — to power our buildings and personal devices, to transport goods, to travel.Yet, the energy sources we’ve come to rely upon, like oil, gas, and coal, will eventually run out.With the MOS energy needs apparent, my partners and I felt a lot more knowledgeable about these renewable sources.
It revolved around :
-Hydroelectric power
-Solar power
-Geothermal Energy
-Photoviolic
Hydroelectric Power
First station I crossed was the Hydroelectric station in which they explained hydropower, which is electricity produced by moving water. It’s used so widely in the U.S. that it generates more electricity than any other renewable source. Rushing water from a river or waterfall is channeled through pipes, spinning a turbine to drive a generator. Because the flow of water is relatively constant, hydropower can deliver large amounts of continuous electricity over long periods of time.
Hydropower requires strong currents to produce significant amounts of electricity. Much of the hydropower in the United States is generated in the Pacific Northwest. Although inexhaustible electricity source, we learned it does carry some associated environmental concerns. Building large dams can negatively impact local ecosystems and interfere with fish migration patterns.
Other forms of hydropower can be used to produce electricity from moving water. Tide power and wave power provide new ways to create electricity from the oceans. Concluding that newer methods may produce cheaper electricity with less environmental impact.
Solar Power
After came the Solar station whichtougth me how it focuses sunlight onto a small area and uses the resulting heat to make electricity. Mirrors or lenses concentrate the light from the Sun into a end point, heating up some fluid by hundreds of degrees. The heat created is used to make steam, which moves a turbine and generates electrical power.
Sunlight is the Earth’s most abundant energy resource, but it so disperse that little energy is available at any given spot. By focusing the Sun’s light onto a focused area, the energy is concentrated and used more effectively to make electricity. Even tho is a pretty nice energy source, one of the drawbacks is the large amount of space that is needed to collect a useful amount of solar energy. But in places such as deserts with open, sunny spaces, concentrating solar technologies can generate utility-scale power at relatively low cost.
What’s for the future? some may ask, well the newest installations are using molten salt that can store heat for hours or even days, which allows solar power plants to continue generating electricity during the night or during times of cloudy weather.
As a cool fact the museum had a interactive map, of all the solar ports in the area:
In which we can see how solar energy has been increasing from 2003 to 2013:
Geothermal Energy
Geothermal electric systems generate electric power using heat from within the Earth. Engineers drill a mile or more into the Earth’s crust, tapping into underground reservoirs where hot rocks and water are heated by magma deep beneath the surface. Geothermal power is sometimes called hydrothermal generation, because the energy comes from hot water. The hot steam pushes a turbine to spin a generator, generating clean electricity.
Because the Earth’s core is so hot, the potential for geothermal energy is tremendous. However, geothermal “hot spots” are most common where the plates that make up the Earth’s crust intersect. Although the United States is the world leader in total geothermal power production, all of its geothermal power is concentrated in just four western states. A single site north of San Francisco called “The Geysers” accounts for over half of all U.S. geothermal electricity. Small nations that are located on plate boundaries, such as Iceland and the Phillipines, generate large portions of their electricity from geothermal power.
Current geothermal installations have been limited to places where water is easily accessed. Engineered geothermal systems (EGS) are created by drilling into hot, dry rocks and injecting cold water under pressure. As the pressure builds, the rocks fracture and the liquids are heated by the surrounding rock. A recent study by MIT estimated that engineered geothermal systems could meet the world’s electricity needs for thousands of years.
Photovoltaic Energy
Photovoltaics, also called solar panels or PV, transform sunlight into electricity. Photovoltaic cells are made from materials called semiconductors. The most common semiconductor used in solar cells is silicon, which is found in sand and is abundant in the Earth’s crust. When sunlight strikes the surface of the cell, some of the light particles are absorbed by the semiconducting material, causing negative electric charges to flow across the surface of the cell. The cell is designed so that the charges will uniformly flow in one direction and can be used to do electrical work.
Because solar panels are self-contained systems, they can be used in remote locations away from the electric grid, or they can be grid-connected. Solar panels are often used on roadways or on space satellites. Although photovoltaic panels are most commonly installed on building rooftops, they can also be integrated into the buildings as roofs, windows, curtain walls, and even parking canopies. Solar farms are increasingly being used for utility-scale production as well, although they require a large amount of space to collect utility-scale amounts of solar energy.
Because silicon is also used in circuit boards and must be chemically treated (“doped”) to be a semiconductor, current photovoltaic technology is significantly more expensive than fossil fuels or many other renewable methods. New thin-film and “string ribbon” materials require far less silicon to do the same job as older cells. New generations of photovoltaics made from plastics and inks may soon make solar panels much cheaper or as easy to fabricate as printing a letter!