Stepping into the era of renewable energy (RE) will bring forth big socioeconomic changes all over the world. It will introduce a new industry and new means of living to all sorts of people. Those having vocal skills will work on the projects, operations, and all supported industries, such as agriculture and transportation.
But the high impact will be on the normal citizens, from whom governments will buy their energy.
Inhabitants and households could install solar panels on their roofs—or with the advanced silicon film solar panels, they can install them on their glass windows and start to generate power that could be saved on batteries and fed into the national grid. Governments will be most willingly to buy this extra clean energy at good prices all year.
These small setups are actually small solar farms which are accumulated to generate a high rate of power output that could be transferred to any part of the world through international electric grids.
So a small house in Egypt’s Sinai can generate electricity that could light a house in Siberia. This small cell of power generation could generate a humongous amount of clean and cheap energy. Besides that, it could be a mean of decent living and a source of revenue for many people from all classes.
In Germany there are full solar roof top communities .These communities achieve the power generation of a huge solar station. Now, the generation of power is decentralised and localised, with no need to connect to far central stations through cables and transformers; houses are directly plugged in to their own power generation on the roof top.
Houses export the excess power through the grid to various areas which need this excess power.
The oil market became very volatile and vulnerable because of political conflicts. Nations that are poor of fossil fuel energy are always at the mercy of OPEC countries. In other words, some nations cannot live without OPEC countries, and history has shown us how OPEC countries can use this wealth against other nations and control the market.
In order to achieve energy security, nations have to depend on their natural RE resources, which are available everywhere.
Sun, wind, biomass, and hydroelectricity are there and can generate enough power for any nation that has the will to dedicate the necessary resources.
This security will provide nations with political security as well because they can make their own decisions and choices without any outside threats or manipulations.
Eng. Hisham Farouk Mostafa is a M.Sc. of Green & Renewable Energy, Atlantic University, USA
