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Renewable Resources

Renewable resources are either resources that can naturally regenerate at a rate comparable or faster than the rate of human consumption or perpetual resources that are abundantly available in nature. Examples are solar radiation, wind, water currents and tides, and biomass resources, all of which can be used to generate energy for human consumption.

Renewable resources have long been used by humans for energy consumption. The first fires were made with renewable wood resources, and for centuries, wind has been used for milling grains and pumping water. In this respect, the contemporary calls for energy production and consumption patterns that are totally based on renewable energy resources could be regarded as a call to go back to preindustrial times. The differences with those times, however, lie in technology and societal scale.

The use of nonrenewable resources for modern energy production started only recently in human history. The exploration for and use of coal, oil, gas, and—later on—uranium fueled the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century and are still the major fuels for energy in industrialized economies. The call to replace the use of nonrenewable resources with renewable resources is motivated by the expected depletion of exploitable reserves of oil, gas, and uranium within the current century and by global warming induced by the emission of carbon dioxide as a by-product of fossil-based energy production and consumption.

From the use of fossil fuels over the last centuries, the world has inherited worldwide networks of energy exploration and infrastructures of transport, generation, and distribution toward final consumers. Apart from that, the functioning of economy and society at large has become totally fossil energy dependent. A turn toward the use of renewable resources would therefore not mean a turn to preindustrial times but rather a modernization or makeover of our fossil-fuel based energy system. This dilemma emphasizes the implications of such a turn for energy consumption patterns and consumers.

Localization, Decentralization, Distributed Generation

The implications of a turn to renewable resources for consumer culture can be understood only if characteristics of an energy system based on renewable resources are compared to those of the current fossil energy system. First, fossil fuels are of a rather uniform nature if compared to the range of renewable energy resources available. Oil, gas, coal, and uranium are drawn from specific sites all around the world, while renewable resources can be either generated at very specific sites (hydropower, geothermal energy) or are available all around the world (solar radiation, biomass). In a similar vein, the infrastructures and technologies for fossil fuel energy production and consumption are rather uniform as compared to the renewable energy production and consumption technologies. But perhaps the most relevant difference for the discussion of implications of renewable energy resources for consumer culture is that energy systems based on renewable resources are so far much more localized and decentralized than their fossil-fuel based predecessors. Biomass resources, such as wood or harvest by-products, are more often than not being used in local biomass energy plants. Solar panels are mostly applied on the roofs of their users. Notwithstanding the huge wind farms that are now being constructed offshore in northwestern Europe, most (99 percent, according to World Wind Energy Association [WWEA], 2009) wind energy is still being produced on land and consumed in the region of generation. Whereas fossil and nuclear based energy production fits into a model of centralized supply over large energy grids, renewable resources much more rely on decentralized modes of production and consumption. Hence, the model that better fits the production and consumption of renewable energy is that of distributed generation, defined as “electric power generation within distribution networks or on the customer side of the network” (Ackermann, Andersson, and Söder 2001, 201). In the case of distributed generation, the main grid serves as a backup system providing or receiving power to and from consumers.

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