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Energy is the most importantly needed resource in 21st century. Energy is the important source for almost any activity in today’s World. If energy can be generated cheap, more automation can be ensured and improve human comfort level.
As the cost of energy sources (natural gas, petrol, diesel etc.) are going up, we need to concentrate well on alternate sources of energy like solar energy, tidal power, wind power etc.
About 3 minutes of energy coming from Solar insolation (radiation) can meet the energy requirements of whole World for one year. But collection of solar energy is very expensive. There are no effective methods yet in the industry to capture the solar energy. The space requirement is high and need large number of solar panels. Technology to be developed to concentrate the energy before collection. Engineers should put more efforts in this direction to effectively collect Solar engery.
Tidal power is another huge natural resource for countries having long sea coast such as India, China, USA, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Australia etc.
The next alternate resource is wind power. The wind turbines are very efficient today, but they are expensive. The initial investment is currently very high compared to the energy generation capacity. More hill areas are required with good wind flow rate to generate wind energy.
The global engineering community should work together to develop alternate sources of energy and it should be the main engineering drive in 21st Century. |
