People who care about the environment have recently talked about how the world’s attention has shifted to renewable energy and what that means for the future of the market.
Bertrand Piccard, an explorer and environmentalist, has said that the increased focus on energy is “hopeless” if it doesn’t lead to better efficiency. Piccard says that a third of the world’s energy is lost.
Piccard said, “So it’s hopeless to try to replace fossil fuels with renewables if we aren’t efficient and cut back on electricity use.”
The fact that many people only think of wind or solar energy as options is another problem that Piccard sees. These people forget about biogas and geothermal energy.
He said, “So we focus on producing more instead of consuming less, and in the production that we want to do, we forget about a lot of different types of renewable energies that we don’t take into account.”
Piccard says that the rise in solar panel output could make it hard for other businesses to compete. China has shown the rest of the world how much cheaper solar energy can be than other options. However, since solar makes up most of the market, it is hard to compare how efficient they are to other options.
The European Commission looked into Chinese companies that make solar panels because they said they might have gotten help from handouts that “potentially distort the market.”
Piccard said that China was to thank for making the energy source more cheap, especially since the technology was first created. But there is still a push for economy and a drop in consumption to make a difference. This change has made it much easier for other countries to enter.
