An Overview of Energy Technologies for a Sustainable Future

Abstract

Population and the economic growth are highly correlated with the energy demand. The world population was multiplied by a factor of 1.59 (reaching above 7 billion) from 1980 to 2013, while the total energy consumption of the world was multiplied by 1.84 (getting beyond 155,000 TWh) in the same time interval. Furthermore, the demand for energy is expected to increase even more with an average annual rate of 1.2 % in the near future. However, for the last 30 years, about 85-90 % of the energy demand is supplied by petroleum, natural gas, and coal, even though they are harmful for the environment and estimated to be depleted soon. Hence, building energy policies to satisfy the needs of increasing population and growing economy in a sustainable, reliable, and secure fashion has become quite important. This may involve optimizing the energy supplies, minimizing the environmental costs, promoting the utilization of clean and renewable energy resources and diversifying the type of energy sources. Thus, not only the conventional energy generation technologies must be developed more, but also environmentally friendly alternative energy sources (such as wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and bio) must become more widespread to sustain the energy needs for the future. However, this requires a significant amount of research on energy technologies and an effective management of the energy sources.