Are wind and solar power the answer to our energy needs?

There's a lot of sun and a lot of wind.

They're free.

They're clean.

No CO2 emissions.

So what's the problem?

Why do solar and wind combined provide less than 2% of the world's energy?

To answer these questions, we need to understand what makes energy or anything else for that

matter cheap and plentiful.

For something to be cheap and plentiful, every part of the process to produce it, including

every input that goes into it, must be cheap and plentiful.

Yes, the sun is free.

Yes, wind is free.

But the process of turning sunlight and wind into usable energy on a mass scale is far

from free.

In fact, compared to the other sources of energy, fossil fuels, nuclear power, and hydroelectric

power, solar and wind power are very expensive.

The basic problem is that sunlight and wind as energy sources are both weak, the more

technical term is dilute, and unreliable, the more technical term is intermittent.

It takes a lot of resources to collect and concentrate them and even more resources to

make them available on demand.

These are called the diluteness problem and the intermittency problem.

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