What Is The Cost Of Efficient Energy?

Photo: Some rights reserved by SCA Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget via Flickr

Green energy has always been a hot topic of debate, both for those who are for it and for those who are against it. Every time something even remotely relating to green energy comes up, the debate rages anew. Proposition 39 is a tax code fix for California that vows to put yet another 550 million of its 1 billion annual additional income towards green energy. -But do we need more money invested toward green energy?

Put simply, yes we do. Certainly the critics of green energy have their points however. The sad fact is that as it currently stands, green energy is quite inefficient. In terms of raw money per gigawatt of power, fossil fuels win out by quite a large margin. -Even with all this money being invested into both research and development of green energy tech and power plants.  The government has spent approximately 172 billion dollars in green energy between 1961 and 2008, and yet fossil fuels are still the standard.

Then again, fossil fuels have cost the country 30 trillion dollars between 1970 and 2009 and are becoming increasingly expensive. More expensive to explore for future sources of oil and other finite resources and simply realities like the increasing global demand for those resources effect the price drastically. The main price tag in green energy however, lies simply within the equipment for gathering power. Green energy does have an advantage in the fact that although there are some expensive up-front costs, once the systems are in place, they simply produce energy. A hydro dam, a wind farm, a solar farm, for example need mostly maintenance only after construction. A pretty appealing thought and as the green technology becomes cheaper, the original investments will be even easier to make with the same reward in return.

Traditional, non-renewable energy simply won’t last forever, and it will become more expensive as finite supplies dwindle. If we want to avoid certain catastrophe and energy prices that are simply not affordable in the future, we need to invest in alternative energy today. Depending on the current strategy of chasing pockets of oil and other finite sources to produce energy is not sustainable  -neither for the environment nor in reality.

Let’s make the wise choice to invest in alternative energy now, and be confident that we can see an energy secure future for tomorrow.

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