Renewable Sources of Energy

Renewable sources of energy

Another way to stop the problem of Global Warming is to get rid of the greatest source of CO2 emissions. The biggest source of Carbon Dioxide emissions are power stations that burn fossil fuels.

So if the coal power stations are replaced by the renewable sources of energy it will reduce the concentration of CO2 but also get rid of the coal mining and transportation, which have huge environmental impacts such as deforestation, water and air pollution and also CO2 emissions from transport. Most wide spread types of renewable energy are hydro electric energy, solar energy and wind energy. However hydro electric power requires blocking the river with huge dams to provide sufficient amounts of energy. Therefore it causes problems downstream, as it interrupts in the natural processes of the river. Having studied the dams and their effects, I would eliminate them from my choice of possible solutions of renewable energy as though it doesn't emit CO2 it harms the environment in other ways.

Solar energy

Solar energy I relatively new area of energy production, which was developing in very fast pace over the last few decades. There are different solar panels on the market. They should be compared by cost effectiveness to see which one is the best, to know what the total output of energy they have is and how many panels would it require to get rid of the fossil fuels for good. Using the British site "http://www.comparemysolar.co.uk" It is possible to extract data for different producers of solar panels for comparison.

For four different producers of solar panels the effectiveness of one panel was compared to its productivity. Effectiveness was calculated by dividing its energy output by cost of setting up one panel.

On the scatter graph data for different producers was marked in different colours to make it clearer to see if there is any correlation. It seems as for each of the producers there is a different correlation: For GD solar and electrical the effectiveness of panels increases as their productivity increases however for EvoEnergy it seems to be pretty much the same.

Drawing a trend line showed that there is a slight positive correlation that can be summarized by saying that the more energy one panel produces the more cost effective it is, even though it can cost more than the smaller one. However to prove that there is a positive correlation it is possible to use Spearman's rank.

To start with I state that there s a significant correlation between the productivity and effectiveness of solar panels. Now in the table below all the values are ranked from highest to lowest and then the difference between the ranks and difference squared are calculated to be used in the formula: 1-(6∑▒d^2 )/(n^3-n).

n Energy Rank Effectiveness Rank Difference in ranks

kWh rank Kwh/₤ rank d d2

1 4330 16 0.28 16 0 0

2 5620 13 0.35 13 0 0

3 7340 10 0.40 11 1 1

4 21750 1 0.45 10 9 81

5 5500 15 0.55 5 10 100

6 6500 11 0.62 2.5 8.5 72.25

7 8520 8 0.59 4 4 16

8 16200 3 0.62 2.5 0.5 0.25

9 6030 12 0.46 9 3 9

10 10090 7 0.49 6.5 0.5 0.25

11 12110 5 0.49 6.5 1.5 2.25

12 20450 2 0.47 8 6 36