DO WE HAVE FUTURE???
-Eruva Bhargavi,EEE,B.TECH (III/IV)
Around 20.25 trillion KWH of energy is produced all over the world in a year. Approximately India produces 835.3 billion KWH of energy out of 20.25 trillion KWH. Recent studies show that energy consumption rate is increasing linearly every year from 2000.All this statistics here reveal that every year very significant percentage of non-renewable energy resources are being depleted. After few years most of these resources will be extinct. So now we are left with question that whether we have a future in production of electricity in coming generations??? With growing value of rate energy consumption every year in our country it is sure that non-renewable energy resources are on the edge of extinction. So we need to go for an alternative which is not going to extinct and give the same results as previous resources. Thus, concept of using renewable energies comes into the picture. The three main renewable resources which we can use for production of electricity are solar energy, wind and water which are available in plenty of amounts worldwide. Hydro electricity is harnessed in large amounts in India but wind and solar energies are still in the stage of development. Though the solar energy and wind energy are in plenty of amounts when available but we need to consider the fact that wind does not blow continuously and we do not have sun all the time, so production of electricity through these resources is not reliable because plant can shut down in the absence of these resources. This give rise to the concept of hybridizing two resources so that one produces electricity in absence of other .Thus hybrid solar wind power plant came into existence. This plant contains two hybrid units one for wind and other for solar resources mostly wind turbine power plant and PV solar cell power plant. Solar energy is captured using photo voltaic cells and some technologies like Fresnel reflector, parabolic trough which concentrate solar energy on a one particular place which contains semiconductor materials; these materials capture the heat from solar energy and coverts into electrical energy. Since power production is not sufficient we need to concentrate on what type of electricity we have whether it is ac or dc. Generally we get dc electricity which is to be changed into ac electricity. Grid-tie inverter is used for this purpose. These use different algorithms for producing maximum efficiency one of them is Maximum power point tracking technique which is widely used in manufacturing of grid tie inverters, MPPT is that which extracts maximum power from input so as to increase the efficiency of system. There are many more technologies which are being used today for generation of electricity from renewable energies, the above stated methods are just an example. So the answer for the question discussed at the starting of the article seems to be yes if the rate of research in the field of renewable energies increases linearly so that we come up with many more new ideas for harvesting the energy, then we can definitely say we do have future in the field power production in coming generations.
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