We are living in a very interesting time. There are some parallels in history where things have changed so drastically in such a short time that we can’t help but notice this blip in the historical timeline. To give you an idea of what I am talking about, if you look at what happened when the industrial revolution took place you will see a time of great advancement. We are again facing a time which is going to make a big change in our history and it has to do with renewable energy. The steamroller of renewable energy is plowing on and more types of renewable energy are coming into use every day. It has been predicted that by 2060 most of the world will be running on it. There are already countries which are using more renewable energy than conventional energy. They may not be the biggest countries in the world, but it is a start. Albania and Paraguay are now getting a hundred percent of their electricity from hydroelectric plants. In many other countries renewable energy is making a large inroad.

The ideal situation for most of us would be homes which have their own power. There would be no more blackouts across cities and the big worry of the power grid being knocked out during a time of emergency or war would be eliminated. It seems the best source for renewable energy is the sun. It shines everywhere on our planet and the only places which might need auxiliary power, which is not from the sun, are the North and South Poles. Since there is not much habitation in these two areas it is really not a big problem. Even in these areas renewable energy can be used, it will just have to come from somewhere else, probably the ocean. If we look at conditions today we realize we really don’t need coal or oil to fuel generators. This is no longer a secret and even the big oil companies know this and are trying to squeeze out profits from every last drop of oil that remains.

One of the problems we face is developing new types of batteries which can store energy for much longer times and have much longer lives. There seems to be a couple of different answers to this problem. The first one is a new type of battery which has been announced that is a liquid battery and the scientist developing it claims it has a life of ten years with minimal maintenance. The problem with liquid batteries up to this point is they didn’t last. The second answer may be something which has been with us for a while which might have been kept from us. It has to do with Nikola Tesla the great engineer and scientist. He had discovered a way to use cosmic rays as power for a car. If this was kept from us there has to be a record of it somewhere. As with things like this there is no way for us to prove any of this, but we do know when Nikola Tesla died, the US government went directly into his apartment and took all of his scientific papers.

The president has stated he wants to increase coal production and oil production. This is sort of like shoveling sand against the tide. Maybe it could work for a small amount of time, but that time would be very limited and we would be better served by becoming the world’s leading nation in renewable energy instead of becoming the world’s leading nation of obsolete energy. Sometimes when jobs are lost they never come back. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. When I was young and you wanted to go bowling, pinboys would set up the pins. Today machines do the job of the pinboys. This was an early example of automation replacing humans. How many people today take elevators which are being operated by humans? There probably isn’t one human elevator operator left in the city of New York and maybe in the entire United States. If a worker is on an elevator it is usually to help load it. This is what is going to happen to petroleum fueled energy, it will simply disappear at some time in the future, because renewable energy will become a lot cheaper and as we all know the price of things dictates what we do.

Using renewable energy is also beneficial to the planet. Any time you stop dumping crap into the atmosphere it is better for human beings. Even if global warming was not a problem, all that stuff we dump into the air eventually lands up in the earth, in our animals and in ourselves. Using renewable energy can only make things better. Another benefit is the fact we wouldn’t need to use nuclear energy to generate electricity. Nuclear energy leaves us with a tremendous amount of dangerous waste which lasts for hundreds of thousands of years if not longer and jeopardizes the future of humans. There is no safe place to store nuclear waste since the earth is dynamic and over a period of time things move causing even the so-called safe storage area to become dangerous for future generations.

All around us are sources of energy. We are still not taking enough advantage of them. We know about wind, water and sun, but there may be more sources than this such as the cosmic rays Nikola Tesla talked about. Humans generate energy just by walking around and even this can be harnessed. I don’t know what percentage of the power needed in a small city could be generated this way, but whatever it is, it certainly helps. All day long we walk up and down stairs, halls and streets, and go through doorways. It takes energy to do this which could be recouped. An example of this would be connecting a generator and battery to a revolving door on an office building. A busy office building door will be spinning all day long. If the hallways were sensitive to footsteps and could recoup that energy we might cut down on the building’s needs by a significant amount.

The energy revolution is coming and many of us are young enough to see it when it happens.