Introduction to Power Plant Engineering

CHAPTER 18

Renewable Energy

18.1 Introduction

The history of industrial civilization is associated intimately with the history of energy transitions. In less developed, agrarian economies, people’s basic need for food calories is provided through simple forms of agriculture, which is essentially a method of capturing solar energy for human use. Solar energy, stored in firewood or other biomass, meets other basic needs for home heating and cooking. With further development of economy, energy requirement has increased greatly with the result that supplies of firewood and other biomass energy proved insufficient to support the growing economies. Accordingly, people turned to hydro-power, then to coal during the nineteenth century and then to oil ...