A Review on the Drawbacks of Renewable Energy as a Promising Energy Source of the Future

Abstract

A common misconception of renewable energy (RE) is that it could serve as a holistic solution to the problems associated with the disreputable but yet reliable fossil fuel and nuclear energy. Energy supply and related environmental problems, especially global warming could be successfully addressed just by switching from the conventional fossil fuel and nuclear energy to purportedly environmental friendly and sustainable renewable sources. But this credence is proved to be a fallacy as RE sources could not meet the demand of energy that is growing globally without posing certain associated problems to human and the environment. RE supply from domestic wind, hydroelectric dam, solar energy, ground-source heat, and biomass waste was proven to be incapable of meeting energy demand. The scale of demand for these resources combined would be highly colossal and there are bound to be problems in integrating massive amounts of intermittent RE into existing supply systems. This paper will discuss problems-related RE (biomass sources, wind, solar, hydropower and geothermal energy combined) from engineering, environment, health and economy perspective.