Green Energy Essay: Renewable Energy Sources and Sustainability

This essay examines green energy, focusing on renewable energy sources like solar, ocean, and geothermal. It highlights the environmental advantages of renewable energy, such as sustainability and reduced waste, while also acknowledging challenges like supply reliability. The essay discusses the potential for renewable energy to create business opportunities by reducing costs and improving brand image through corporate social responsibility. It concludes that a balanced approach, combining renewable energy with fossil fuels, is the most effective strategy. References from academic journals support the discussion on current trends, future prospects, and the enabling technology of renewable energy sources. The essay also touches on the social acceptance of renewable energy and business models for customer-sited solar photovoltaics.

Running head: GREEN ENERGY
Green energy
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1GREEN ENERGY
It has been seen that the government of United States depends significantly on natural
resources like natural gas, coal, oil and many more fossil fuels that are not at all renewable. That
indicates that whether it is extracted in an uncontrolled or controlled manner, eventually the
resources will be hard to get and the world will run out of the necessary resources. The major
amount of renewable energies is retrieved directly or indirectly from the solar energy. Solar
energy might be used indirectly or directly from the sunlight for lighting and heating purposes in
domestic houses or in business organizations. Nowadays renewable energy has become an
important tool for generating electricity in an environment-friendly manner. There is ocean
energy that can be generated from waves of the ocean or from the tidal waves (Ellabban, Abu-
Rub and Blaabjerg 2014). Recently there have been significant rise in using geothermal energy
extracted from Earth’s internal heat.
The major advantages of renewable energy are that there is no threat of running out of
energy and those are in general extremely environment friendly. Using renewable energy
requires very less maintenance cost and in most cases, the renewable energy generates no
harmful waste products that are harmful for the environment (Twidell and Weir 2015). In various
regional areas, the projects related to renewable energy provides economic benefits.
There are some disadvantages of using renewable energy too and those are mentioned in
this section of this essay. It is significantly troublesome to generate the required electricity for
the domestic and business sectors only from the renewable sources and sometimes the reliability
of the supply of energy from renewable sources get hampered (Strupeit and Palm 2016). There
are some other issues too, like, to generate adequate solar energy, the sky needs to be clear and
bright sunlight on the solar panel will be necessary. Thus, it can be said that using both

2GREEN ENERGY
renewable energy and energy from the fossil fuel in a balanced way can become the best
solution.
Using renewable energy sources can open up various business opportunities and those are
mentioned in this part of the essay. It is seen that the business organizations have to pay a
significant amount of money each month for their consumption of electricity, where as if they
opt for renewable energy, they will certainly be able to lower the cost (Stigka, Paravantis and
Mihalakakou 2014). As a responsible business organization the management of the organization
can show the people of their operational area that using renewable energy is their contribution
for the benefit of environment as a corporate social responsible business organization. This type
of initiative can immensely improve the brand image of the organization. Uses of renewable
energy can potentially increase job opportunities as it would require modification in
infrastructure to generate adequate renewable energy. Thus to conclude, it can be said that
though depending solely on the renewable energy can become an issue, but, being able to
balance the usage of renewable energy with the fossil fuel or generating energy from the natural
resources will be much more effective in the current situation.

3GREEN ENERGY
References
Ellabban, O., Abu-Rub, H. and Blaabjerg, F., 2014. Renewable energy resources: Current status,
future prospects and their enabling technology. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 39,
pp.748-764.
Stigka, E.K., Paravantis, J.A. and Mihalakakou, G.K., 2014. Social acceptance of renewable
energy sources: A review of contingent valuation applications. Renewable and Sustainable
Energy Reviews, 32, pp.100-106.
Strupeit, L. and Palm, A., 2016. Overcoming barriers to renewable energy diffusion: business
models for customer-sited solar photovoltaics in Japan, Germany and the United States. Journal
of Cleaner Production, 123, pp.124-136.
Twidell, J. and Weir, T., 2015. Renewable energy resources. Routledge.