reNEWable energy

Video Time!

This is Germany's solar energy plan! I'll talk more about the video in a while.


So for today’s lesson, it was about energy – particularly renewable energy. With all the talk about the world not having enough energy to sustain us for the next 100 years or so, and the talk about climate change due to the horrible, unsustainable methods we use to get energy, it seems like renewable energy is our only solution – or perhaps its our only solution.

The most common sources of renewable energy that we know of currently are solar energy, wind energy, hydro energy and nuclear energy. Though they are adopted in many countries, it only produces ___ percent of the world energy. There’s still a long way to go before renewable energy produce most of our world’s energy.  

How do we get countries to produce and use renewable energy? In our own country, lovely Singapore, we do have any renewable energy sources. It is true that our land space is too limited to build any renewable energy source – for example how many windmills can Singapore build? Or nuclear plants? Well, its true we can install solar panels, with Singapore being so sunny most of the time, such that we Singaporeans keep sweating all the time, and our use of electricity is hitting the roof – quote slide. But we have yet to implement it!

Let’s observe Germany, a country, who unlike Singapore, is not at all sunny for most of the time, and yet has one of most number of solar panels being built. How did they do it? Germany has came up with an interesting and feasible way to get it citizens to switch to the use of renewable energy - particularly solar energy. And that is cash incentive. And that is what the above video is talking about. But prof said that when you try to do it in Singapore, it was not allowed. Singapore still got a long way to go to renewable energy!

So for presentation today, my classmates presented really interesting ideas that they have researched. Some of the more interesting ideas were tornado energy and matter-anti-matter annihilation energy. Cool huh! 

 

Tornado energy is harnessing the power of tornado. The tornado reactor will be placed beside coal-fired factories so the hot steam coming from the factories will mix with cool air in the reactor to create a tornado. And there is minimal energy that is needed to be contributed to reactor because no energy is need to heat the air, all the hot steam is recycled from the coal-fired plant. 

Next up, it is the energy created by the collision of matter and anti-matter. So in case you are wondering, matter is mainly just anything on Earth. Your bottle, your food, a hamster, grass or even yourself. You are a matter. So as Confucius say, every Yin has a Yang, every good has an evil, therefore every matter has an anti-matter. 

 The collision of matter and anti-matter will cause them to eliminate one another, creating huge amount of energy. A mass of just 1 kg contains an energy of 90 million gigajoules, equivalent to worldwide energy consumption over 90 minutes.


But the risk is really big. The accident collision of matter and anti matter may destroy the world, way worse than the nuclear bomb would. In fact, way worse than several nuclear bomb. If countries are already so worried about nuclear energy, especially what happened after Fukushima, they should be way, way, way more worried about this. 


Furthermore, the collision of matter and anti matter may result in the formation of a black hole. It is crazy even imagining having a black hole on Earth! Maybe after thousands of years of absorbing everything on Earth, Earth itself may get absorbed. Gosh, so sci-fi.


It is a do or die thing. If it succeed, the world will never have to worry about energy ever again. or about harming the environment to get it. But if it doesn't, bye bye to the human race. So its about humans probably slowly dying off or a quick fast one - one minute you are here, next minute you just poof. Anyone dare to take the risk?


With that thought-provoking question, here's me signing off!