Energy

2Advances in Alternative Sources of Energy: Opening New Doors for Energy Sustainability

Jyoti Tyagi

Department of Chemistry, Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

2.1 Introduction

Energy is regarded as an essential and crucial commodity for the economic growth of a country and more importantly for developing nations. Energy resources whether renewable or non‐renewable are consumed to generate electricity to meet the energy demand of a nation (Sorrell 2015). At present, main sources of energy are fossil fuels, namely coal, natural gas and petroleum‐based fuels (Balat 2007; Abas et al. 2015). Identification of non‐renewable energy sources and past, present and future of these energy sources are exhaustively studied. Industrial revolution has exploited these resources at a rapid rate. Extensive use of these energy resources leads to increase in CO₂ amount on earth. Non‐renewable energy sources dependency poses a threat on the earth's environment which ultimately leads to negative impact on global climate (Martins et al. 2019). Further, current consumption of fossil fuels and their continuously increasing demand also endanger biodiversity on the earth (Harfoot et al. 2018). There is a huge pressure on existing energy resources due to exponential increase in the world population. Looking at the reserves of the non‐renewable energy resources (Zou et al. 2016) and to achieve the goal of energy sustainability in future, use of renewable energy sources seems ...