By Harry Cooper – In many religions and cultures, God is identified as energy: the wind, lightning, the sun and volcanoes. Indigenous people believe their is spiritual energy in water. The Egyptians and Greeks worshiped the sun, as do Hindus today in their yearly Chhath Puja festival. In Chinese Taoism, Qi energy flows throughout nature. Religions show humanity that God given energies are the ones humanity should use as they are holy and perpetual resources.
People have been talking about the switch from non-renewable resources to renewable resources for years now. Nonrenewable resources, such as oil or coal, will run out, and then the people who relied on them, as well as the planet, will be in trouble.
What Are Perpetual Resources?
Renewable resources solve this problem by being assets that we can rely on consistently now, and in the future. However, renewable resources are just that, renewable. These resources have to be used at a rate slower than they can renew themselves or they too will be exhausted, and as our population and demand for resources grows every day, more and more resources that normally regenerate are being extorted and depleted. Enter the perpetual resources. Perpetual resources are a separate class of natural renewable resources that include any resource that can be used seemingly indefinitely, such as solar, wind, or geothermal.
Using Perpetual Resources
Humanity currently relies heavily on nonrenewable fossil fuels that create harmful greenhouse gasses to power our planet. However with perpetual resources, we could have endless energy, if we used them properly.
However, there are still some hurdles in using perpetual resources to their full extent. Using any kind of resource requires investing in and building infrastructure in order to harness the energy, such as wind farms and solar panels. This infrastructure requires lots of money and resources. Along with this, we may not have the technology to harness certain perpetual resources efficiently yet.
Thus, even though perpetual resources can provide a great alternative to the current way we produce electricity and energy, we still have to make sure we use them in an efficient way.
Examples Of Perpetual Resources
Solar Power
The sun is one of our most prominent natural resources available to us; it is estimated that the amount of sunlight that hits the surface of the Earth in an hour and a half would be enough to fulfil our energy consumption for a full year. Solar energy can already be used to generate electricity through a solar panel, which harnesses the suns energy and stores it in a battery as electricity.
Solar power is an incredibly beneficial source of energy. Not only does solar energy produce no greenhouse gas emissions, but it is also more economically beneficial. Installing solar panels on homes and businesses provide incredible returns on investments and raises property values, as they are a free and endless source of energy. However, solar energy does have some short comings: while solar panels are cost efficient over time, they are expensive to build and install initially. Along with this, the amount of energy they produce can vary depending on the weather, season, or location, making them less reliable.
Wind Power
Strong winds can be found all over the world. Wind power is harnessed through the use of wind turbines. When wind blows, the turbine harnesses the kinetic energy created by the wind and uses it to power a generator that creates an electric current.
Wind energy has numerous benefits, making it one of the fastest growing energy sources in the world. Not only is wind sustainable and cost effective because of it being perpetual, but it has also created jobs and can be built on existing ranch land. One big disadvantage of wind as a resource is that wind turbines need to be built in locations with lots of wind which can often be remote and and hard to get to, making usable land for wind farming limited even when using preexisting ranch land. One solution people have found for this is investing in offshore wind farming, which makes use of the powerful winds on the high seas to power wind turbines.
Geothermal Energy
The center of the Earth is estimated to be just as hot as the surface of the sun, and some of this energy can be found beneath our feet in the Earth’s crust. Geothermal energy works by extracting materials super heated by the Earth’s natural energy, and using it to boil water to create steam to turn turbines, and create energy.
Geothermal is one of the most untapped perpetual resources; scientists have identified many wells of geothermal power that are waiting to be tapped into. However, while geothermal is a clean energy source that has yet to provide humanity with its full potential as an endless source of energy, it has faced some criticism, as the process of extracting materials heated by the Earth’s core has been shown to cause earthquakes.
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