Renewable energy technology...today and tomorrow.
Renewable energy is any naturally occurring, theoretically inexhaustible source of energy, such as biomass, solar, wind, tidal, wave, and hydroelectric power. Energy that is not derived from fossil or nuclear fuel. Technological and scientific advances today make the eradication of human dependency on fossil fuels a coming reality rather than a theory. The truth is that no matter where one stands regarding climate change, the use of fossil fuels causes destruction, disease and death. Wars over foreign oil have cost millions of lives, the coal industry's use of strip mining and other practices causes ecological damage to the planet, and the toll of lung disease and death amongst coal miners is a well documented fact.
We live in a modern world and those who live in industrialized nations are completely dependent on electricity for virtually everything they do throughout their day. From food to employment to recreation, electricity is central to daily life. When one considers the type of language used regarding the damage an EMP (electro magnetic pulse) strike would cause, we hear phrases such as "we would be thrown back to the stone age" and "it would destroy civilization as we know it."
Billions of people simply cannot imagine life without their cell phones or computers. Governments and businesses would shut down without electricity and computing technology. We NEED energy...we just don't need to continue on the path of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas' destruction of our atmosphere. Hemp is one part of a larger equation; hemp biofuels and the cleansing of the atmosphere are just two of the multitude of ways that industrial cannabis can help renew the energy landscape of our world.
Solar Energy and Alternative Energy Sources
From Wikipedia: Now we have large parts of the technology to become a "Type 1" civilization where we get our energy from sources that are not carbon based (and eventually ALL our energy from the sun according to the scale.)
The term Type 1 is from a theoretical model called the Kardashev Scale which is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy a civilization is able to use for communication. The scale has three designated categories:
A Type I civilization—also called a planetary civilization—can use and store all of the energy which reaches its planet from its parent star.
A Type II civilization—also called a stellar civilization—can harness the total energy of its planet's parent star (the most popular hypothetical concept being the Dyson sphere—a device which would encompass the entire star and transfer its energy to the planet(s)).
A Type III civilization—also called a galactic civilization—can control energy on the scale of its entire host galaxy.
The scale is hypothetical, and regards energy consumption on a cosmic scale. It was proposed in 1964 by the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev. Various extensions of the scale have since been proposed, including a wider range of power levels (types 0, IV and V) and the use of metrics other than pure power.
Type I civilization methods
- Large-scale application of fusion power. According to mass-energy equivalence, Type I implies the conversion of about 2 kg of matter to energy per second. An equivalent energy release could theoretically be achieved by fusing approximately 280 kg of hydrogen into helium per second, a rate roughly equivalent to 8.9×109 kg/year. A cubic km of water contains about 1011 kg of hydrogen, and the Earth's oceans contain about 1.3×109 cubic km of water, meaning that humans on Earth could sustain this rate of consumption over geological time-scales, in terms of available hydrogen.
- Antimatter in large quantities would have a mechanism to produce power on a scale several magnitudes above our current level of technology. In antimatter-matter collisions, the entire rest mass of the particles is converted to radiant energy. Their energy density (energy released per mass) is about four orders of magnitude greater than that from using nuclear fission, and about two orders of magnitude greater than the best possible yield from fusion. The reaction of 1 kg of anti-matter with 1 kg of matter would produce 1.8×1017 J (180 petajoules) of energy.
Although antimatter is sometimes proposed as a source of energy, this does not appear feasible. Artificially producing antimatter—according to current understanding of the laws of physics—involves first converting energy into mass, so no net gain results. Artificially created antimatter is only usable as a medium of energy storage, not as an energy source, unless future technological developments (contrary to the conservation of the baryon number, such as a CP violation in favour of antimatter) allow the conversion of ordinary matter into anti-matter. Theoretically, humans may in the future have the capability to cultivate and harvest a number of naturally occurring sources of antimatter.
- Renewable energy through converting sunlight into electricity—either by using solar cells and concentrating solar power or indirectly through wind and hydroelectric power. There is no known way for human civilization to use the equivalent of the Earth's total absorbed solar energy without completely coating the surface with human-made structures, which is not feasible with current technology. However, if a civilization constructed very large space-based solar power satellites, Type I power levels might become achievable—these could convert sunlight to microwave power and beam that to collectors on Earth
Source: Wikipedia - Type 1 & Kardashev Scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale