Renewable Energy
As our reserves of coal, oil and gas are starting to dwindle, alternative sources energy have become ever more important. Fossil fuel costs of production will increase as resources become harder to reach and prices will rise partly as a consequence of these cost increases, but also as demand for an ever-reducing resource increases. The historic high cost of renewable energy will at some point be more than offset by fossil fuel costs, especially since the cost of renewables comes down once the research, development and installation costs have been covered.
Of course, fossil fuels are renewable but the timescales of hundreds of thousands or millions of years are clearly impractical. Biofuels from sustainable crops are one option, but the land resources required for this are competing with land for food production, and since both food and energy requirements are increasing, there will be conflict at some point in the not too distant future.
Two of the most important renewable or sustainable energy sources are wind and solar, both seemingly unlimited and abundantly available. Solar energy harvesting on a large scale takes up a lot of land, which as mentioned above, will also compete with land for food and biofuels. Wind power on the other hand takes up much less space on the ground, so the surrounding land can also be used for crops, biofuels or solar energy production as well.
The scale of solar energy sites can be hard to appreciate, here is one section of the solar farm at Wroughton airfield near Swindon.
My series of images on the theme of Renewable Energy shows the relationship of wind and solar energy production to the landscape, which some people believe is an eyesore while others can see the impressive engineering that goes into such facilities. My work on this theme will develop over the coming years as I get to visit more energy production sites, and I am interested to capture images from other sustainable and renewable energy sources whenever possible. For example, there are energy sources such as biofuel, waste incineration, hydro, geothermal, wave energy, methane gas production, and I'm looking forward to visiting sites whenever possible.
