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Asked by chocolate1 to Angus, Christian, Hannah, Laura, Simon on 24 Jun 2013.
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Angus Ferraro answered on 24 Jun 2013:
There are many things we can use to replace fossil fuels. We could use the energy from the wind and the Sun. Nuclear power is a pretty good source of energy, but needs careful safety regulation. Hydrogen fuel would be good because you could run a car on it and all it would spew out is water. Biofuels could be useful but we must be careful not to use up the land we need to grow food.
We have a range of options and all of them could be useful. They all have their drawbacks (just like fossil fuels do) so it seems sensible to use a mixture of these things. All of them could (and probably will) be improved by technological advancements, but it’s not an area I know much about!
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Laura Roberts Artal answered on 24 Jun 2013:
I agree with Angus. We have a lot of options to choose from, but I think the most important thing we have to do is use a mixture of all of them to make the most of them and get the best results.
Other renewable energies we could invest in are tidal power, geothermal energy (the Earth produces heat which that can be harvested, 87% of all the hot water and heating in building in Iceland comes from this sort of energy) and also hydroelectricity (electricity produced by releasing water from a damn, for example).
Like Angus, I’m really not an expert in this field :s! This BBC website, , is a really good place to learn about renewable energy! http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/geography/energy_resources/energy_rev1.shtml
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Simon Holyoake answered on 24 Jun 2013:
There is a very good book on this subject called ‘sustainable energy without the hot air’ it’s free to download from
Broadly the answer is that we require a renewable energy source such as fusion power to realistically meet the needs of our current lifestyles in the UK, while technologies such as solar, wind, tidal and others are excellent and well worth pursuing, long term, we don’t have enough capability to replace fossil fuels unless we either significantly reduce our energy consumption or develop high power fusion generation (or both)
currently the record for fusion power generation is only 65% (ie it only generated 65% of the energy required to start the process) but hopefully this number will increase in time
Some of our other areas of research are in improving solar cell efficiency which is encouraging, many solar panels can now output nearly twice as much energy for the same area, and hopefully trends like this will continue, as well as technology like fuel cells which allow us to store a great deal of surplus energy, and power vehicles and machinery
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Christian Maerz answered on 25 Jun 2013:
Fossil fuels, to be very honest, will certainly be around for a number of decades – too many industry branches, jobs, money and politics is involved to change the current situation very quickly. I personally think we could reach independence of fossil fuels pretty quickly if everybody works together. For example, if every house on the planet had solar panels on the roof, we would not have any energy shortage. So the REAL problem is not technology, but rather the mindset of people. We will need to rethink our general lifestyle of growth and increasing consumption. And there are some countries that are especially bad at this rethinking process, mostly because fossil fuels are still so cheap there.
Technological developments will probably go into the directions of offshore wind parks, tidal power, or wave energy. This would work very well around many parts of Britain, because wind, waves, and tides is something we are really not short of.
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