The Missouri Times: Solar Energy in Missouri: The Impending Insurgency of Clean Electricity
Global concerns about how electricity and energy are generated has led to increased scrutiny on fossil fuel sources and enhanced the focus on creating sustainable renewable forms of energy in the last few decades. While some interpret this shift towards as the the writing on the wall signaling the beginning of the end of fossil fuels, others like the World Economic Forum recognize that those forms of energy still have a large role to play in the future, even though it may be more of a supporting role rather than the lead.
Renewable energy sources, everything ranging from hydro power to geothermal power to the burning of waste and wood to solar, tidal and wind power have their own problems and benefits attached to them, but each of them gets around the primary problem of fossil fuel sources: limited supply. Natural gas, coal and oil are finite resources, and while technology continues to make extracting the most from the earth possible and making what we have more efficient, eventually those supplies will run out or become rare enough that the expense simply won’t be worth their use.
As the name suggests, renewable resources have a theoretically or practically unlimited supply. The wind will blow and the sun will shine for billions of years into the future. Some like renewable energy because some sources tend to be more environmentally friendly, and others appreciate the reliability and independence they can offer. Around 13 percent of the energy in the United States is made from renewable energy. About eight percent is hydroelectric dams, five percent is wind power, and less than one percent is solar power. But that last category is one where some experts, including those in Missouri, believe the most gains can be made.
What’s usually considered the largest impediment to solar power is available sunlight. In rainy cities like Seattle, photovoltaics make little sense. However, Missouri has more solar potential than most parts of Germany, which generates almost seven percent of its total energy from solar panels.
The process itself is a bit complex, but this TED-Ed video does a good job of explaining how photovoltaic (PV) cells harness sunlight to generate energy.
