Is changing to renewable energy that easy?
In an ever changing world full of technology which requires energy to run it became equally important to find sustainable and low carbon means of production leading to a rise in renewable energy production. A sector made up of solar, wind, hydro and geothermal power plants and others is now expected according to Statista to to almost double to 2025 billion USD by 2030 from 1092 billion in 2023. This disruption has brought a number of challenges that are yet to be addressed as well as opportunities to avail which we will explore further.
A big benefit of advancement in the renewables sector has been the fact that these power plants like wind turbines can now be monitored and managed remotely thanks to digital technology. As a result, jobs for technicians and engineers who can maintain and repair wind turbines using digital tools and techniques have been created. It is now possible to collect and analyse vast amounts of data generated by wind turbines using digital technologies. This has created a demand for skilled data analysts who can use this data to optimise wind turbine performance and efficiency. This is just an example of how there is a boom in the green jobs market.
Digital technologies have the potential to make renewable energy more accessible to people living in remote or underserved areas. Off-grid solar systems, for example, outfitted with digital technology, can provide dependable and affordable electricity to communities without access to traditional power grids. It becomes a way for allowing access to electricity across the globe. Not only that, but this also assists consumers in more efficiently managing their energy consumption by providing real-time information about energy use, allowing them to adjust their consumption patterns to save money and reduce their environmental impact.
However, one of the biggest challenges of renewables is successful grid integration. This involves using renewables to fully supply the grid all the way to seeing how it can handle expansion in renewable energy supply. As renewable power plants depend on natural resources, the flow of these natural inputs is often not in the hand of the producer. According to Cortney, Solar produces electricity only 20% of the time. For example, due to the variability in wind speed and difference in sun levels it can really alter the level of electricity produced in wind and solar farms causing power outages and makes it unsuitable for the grid infrastructure to handle such non-uniform voltage supply.
This fluctuation and difficulty in integration with the grid can be resolved with a technology called virtual power plants where softwares are used to connect a network of different small scale distributed energy resources such as solar panels and wind turbines. To collect data like production and electricity storage levels we can use the Internet of things to then feed it into AI to accurately analyse and predict how to optimally align demand and respond to changes in consumption in the most cost effective way which allows us to reduce the variability of renewable sources and shift completely towards a sustainable production.
With energy production levels not aligning with demand levels firms often have the dilemma of having to deal with excess production for example in the case of high constant wind supply. In such cases they require a storage system in the form of batteries which can hold this energy until required. This raises problems as these storage systems are expensive to buy making it difficult to implement renewable power plants, often has energy losses due to inefficiency and is environmentally damaging due to being built from rare metals like lithium as well as chemicals harmful for environment.
Human beings can sleep, but data can not. By using sensors firms will be able to monitor energy storage systems in real time allowing them to identify any potential issues beforehand to be able to do timely maintanence. Not only that, but AI has is being adopted in emerging markets as well to now do fault prediction to avoid equipment failure which can be a costly problem. However, not much can be done in regards to the negative impact of the precious metal mining like lithium in most batteries as even alternatives at the moment like flow batteries rely on other metals like vanadium leading us to the same non-sustainable approach.
Another major challenge on why renewables are often neglected particularly in emerging markets are the high initial costs to setup as compared to traditional energy sources like fossil fuels. Not only that, but it becomes increasingly hard for governments to shift completely towards renewables as currently most countries still rely on fossil fuels as a cheap source of funding their core energy requirement. As we are seeing in the cost of energy crisis in Europe, which is putting doubt on the decision taken by policy makers to switch so fast towards renewables which had only been cheap up till fossil fuels were relied as the main source of energy.
According to Tim, the world’s rooftop size area translates to roughly the area of the United Kingdom, but only half of this 0.2 million square kilometres would be able to fulfil the whole world’s energy requirement. A good example of this is Ireland growing its share of energy produced from solar panels from 2.5 GW to 213GW. This strategy saves up a lot of cost due to solar panels being cheaper than large scale machinery as well due to the fact that we are using existing unused space rather than valuable land. However, this could still pose problems like the efficient sharing of this energy across the country and other grid transmission related problems which would need to be addressed.
To conclude, even though we face problems like grid integration, high setup costs, uneven energy levels and unsustainable storage methods, renewables are paving the way for the world to look at energy differently. It is creating new markets, and even newer ways of dealing with societies problems. If coupled with continously evolving technologies, we can mitigate such problems to progress forward towards a more sustainable future.
