Can you answer these questions?

•  What is sustainable development ?
•  What is renewable energy ?
•  Why should we reduce our dependence on energy from fossil fuels?

Join us on the field trip to find out!

Energy is a usable power that has the capacity to do work. It exists in many forms such as heat, light, sound, electricity, coal, oil, and gasoline. You don't have to think very hard to realize the importance of energy in our lives. Your alarm clock first thing in the morning, the toast, the shower, and your heated home, not to mention the vehicle you drive or ride in, are things you are very dependent on. All of them require energy to operate.

How dependent are we on energy? Just think of the power outage that struck eastern North America on August 14, 2003. The radio broadcasts were advising people where to get water, food, and medicine, and were advising people how to survive for the projected 24 - 48 hours without electricity. If you were suddenly without electricity for 48 hours, how would it affect you?

Why did the power outage happen? There were failures with the power grid. The power grid is a vast interconnection of electricity producing power plants and electricity conducting power lines. The cause was believed to have started by the loss of three to five major transmission lines in northeastern Ohio. Nearly 50 million people in seven U.S. states and Ontario, Canada were affected (Stambaugh, 2003). How does the electricity get from a generation power plant to you? Follow the electricity through the following diagram.

A kilowatt is 1,000 watts. A watt is the basic unit for measuring the rate of producing or consuming energy over time. For example, a typical 75 watt light bulb consumes 75 watts of electricity in one hour. The typical American household consumes 12,000 kilowatt-hours (12,000,000 watt-hours) of electricity in one year. The amount of electricity produced by a power plant is measured in megawatts. A megawatt is 1,000,000 (million) watts. How many megawatt-hours of electricity does the average household use in a month?

All of the goods and services we depend on in our everyday lives are provided to us via an underlying foundation, or infrastructure, of natural and human-built systems (human infrastructure). The natural infrastructure is also known as the ecological infrastructure and is made up of the earth, the environment, and the systems operating within it, such as the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and hydrologic and cycles. The ecological infrastructure provides the fuel and furnishes the materials needed to operate the human infrastructure. The human infrastructure is composed of the transportation, manufacturing, food, economic, government, information, education, and energy systems. All systems, natural and non-natural, produce waste. The ecological infrastructure recycles all of its waste and is a sink for all of the waste from the human infrastructure. To create a sustainable world the ecological infrastructure of systems must be able to absorb, break down, and reuse the waste created by the human systems.

Our current human energy supply system is NOT sustainable. Certain sectors of the current energy system degrade the ecological infrastructure and generate wastes that are overwhelming biological systems, poisoning us and a wide variety of species. A familiar example is acid rain, which results from carbon dioxide and sulfer oxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels. Some wastes are even altering our climate.

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Our current human energy system relies very heavily on non-renewable resources (resources whose quantities are considered finite) that are becoming dangerously depleted leaving little for future generations. Our nation's use of non-renewable resources also creates a strong dependency on foreign countries for supplies such as oil. This creates an increased risk of severe energy crises and war for current and future generations.

This is why using renewable energy is so important. Doing so meets the energy needs of the present generation, provides a sustainable system for future generations to depend on, and extends the availability of limited non-renewable resources. Renewable energy is energy that is produced with or by renewable resources. Renewable resources are able to replace themselves or are continuously present. Renewable energy types to be investigated in this Web site are: wind, hydropower, solar, geothermal, hydrogen, biomass, and methane.

Field trips are educationally stimulating for students and are a wonderful way of providing hands-on experiences that foster active learning. This Web site will take you on virtual field trips which will give you that engaging experience right at your computer. The field trips are designed to enhance your knowledge of renewable energy and to virtually transport you to various real sites in the United States where renewable energy resources are being used to generate electricity.

Stambaugh, Perry. 2003. Grid-Lock. Penn Lines: Your Cooperative Newsmagazine. V. 38: 9 Pennsylvania Rural Electric Association, 212 Locust Street, P.O. Box 1266, Harrisburg, PA 17108-1266.

Video clips are from:
Geothermal Education Office (GEO). 2003. Video. Geothermal Energy: A Renewable Option.