Why non-renewable energy is better than renewable energy Group members: Samuel West Liam Westfield Liam Sayney Jovan Ward Jonathan Xavier Aren Yorke Nicholai Yorke Kaylon taylor

Advantages of non-renewable energy 1. Easily Available: Since these fossil fuels have been of such a great source of energy, more and more extractions are going on every day. The pressure is even more as the population is increasing day by day. With the advancement in science and technology, the refineries and the extraction procedures have also improved a lot. This makes the availability even smoother. 2. Produce Large Amount of Energy: Fossil fuels are easily combustible. Most combustion engines need to be powered with little amount of fuel to and they can produce large amount of energy. All machines, devices, vehicles depend on the fossil fuels, may it be coal, petroleum or natural gas. Oil and fossil fuels abundant and affordable. For example, oil and diesel are still good choices for powering vehicles. Non-renewable energy is cost effective and easier to product and use. There are reservoirs of non-renewable energy sources throughout the world.

3. High Calorific Value: All energy produced has some calorific value 3. High Calorific Value: All energy produced has some calorific value. The more the value, the more effective it is. Fossil fuels are the highest producers of calorific value in terms of energy. This is also one of the reasons why they are still preferred over the renewable sources of energy or the alternative sources of energy. 4. Transportation: The industries need regular supply of fossil fuel like oil, gas and coal. The biggest advantage of using fossil fuels is that they can be easily stored and transported from one place to another.

5. Low Cost: Fossil fuels are available all over the world and the methods to extract energy from them are also not that expensive. . Unlike other alternative sources like solar power or wind turbines whose initial investment cost are too high, fossil fuels have pretty low cost as compared to them. The high cost prevents many people from installing wind turbines or solar panels at their home.

Disadvantages of renewable energy 1. High development cost: It costs a lot to develop renewable energy stations in both research and manufacturing. The known ways of using fossil fuel are less costly because all of the manufacturing and construction processes are already in place. Currently 93% of the world use non-renewable energy but only 7% use renewable energy. This tells us that is clearly more dependent than renewable energy as it is cheap. 2. Vulnerability: Almost all of the renewable energy depend heavily on weather conditions (sun and wind). For example, if there is slow wind then you cannot produce energy as the slow wind cannot turn the wind turbines. But fossil fuels on the other hand, can be used anytime of the day and is not affected by the weather conditions.

3. Unable to produce in Large Quantities: Renewable sources can’t produce energy in a short space of time unlike fossil fuels where it is abundant. Infact, wind energy amounted to be a bit under 1% and solar 0.2% of the world. It would be a huge effort to ramp up production to 5% of the world’s energy supply. 4. Not accessible in all areas: One of the major cons of many of the renewable energy plans is that the raw material – solar intensity, wind or water, is not available in all locations. That mean you will still have to create an infrastructure for transporting the energy that may not be better than what is already in place.

5. Large Areas Required: To produce large amount of energy, large amount of solar panels and wind farms have to be set up. For this, large areas of land are needed to produce such massive amount of energy on large scale. 6. Repairs: Wind turbines are repair prone. These repairs can’t be made by just local materials. They need the specialized world supply of chain that we have today.

7. Create pollution problems: Both wind turbines and solar energy , in their manufacture, use rare earth metals. These rare earth metals actually create a tremendous amount of hazardous and radioactive byproducts. So if we try to increase the wind and solar production then we would need huge amounts of rare earth metals and other polluting minerals. This means that the whole world will need to produce this toxic material. Then to extract this material, it would require a great use of fossil fuel energy. 8. Affects Government Finances: Due to the high prices of wind and solar productions, funds begin to go down. But the inexpensive oil and gas has strengthened the economy a lot. It has allowed for governments to tax oil and gas companies heavily and use the tax revenue to fund government programs.

Estimated length of time left for fossil fuels Fossil fuel Time left Oil 50 years Natural gas 70 years Coal 250 years