by Sam Reynolds

There’s a lot more news about alternative energies recently. Different people have different ideas about just what it is. They also have different ideas about how long alternative energy has been around. I wrote this article to give my perspective on One way to look at it is to consider alternative energy an alternative to "standard" energy. Since the mid-1800s standard energy has pretty much meant fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas. This wasn’t always the case. In the not too distant past, sailing ships and animals powered transportation. I’m sure you seen a picture of a ranch house in the American West with the windmill next to the homestead. They originally were used to pump water. Later they were actually used to generate a small amount of electric power (say, enough to power of crystal radio) in the days before rural electrification Early in the 20th century nearly 1/3rd of homes in Florida used solar hot water. The availability of cheap electricity in the 1940’s changed that. At one point electric companies were even giving away hot water heaters to encourage consumption. I think you can see that our dependence on fossil fuels is relatively recent. Rather than something completely new, using alternative energies is a return to an older practice. So for now we’ll consider alternative energy to be any source of energy that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels to create it. We should make a distinction between alternative energy and renewable energy. People tend to assume that they’re one and the same but they aren’t. Some non-fossil fuel energy sources can be depleted. However most sources of alternative energy are renewable as well as better for the environment than fossil fuel. That is why there is such interest in these types of energy these days. When people think about alternative energy solar panels and windmills are probably the most common things that come to mind. However there are many other forms of alternative energy are ready available (for example geothermal and biomass) and researchers are exploring some entirely new possibilities I think we can safely expect that the use of all forms of alternative energy will increase until they become the new standard.

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