Question: What alternatives have you found so far to using fossil fuels and is there any more to be found?

Vicki Stevenson answered on 21 Jun 2010:

Hi
there are a lot of alternatives to fossil fuels, but I didn’t personally discover any of them.

You’ve probably seen wind farms generating electricity, people are working on machines which can generate electricity from waves and tides. Biofuels are an option for heating and are also useful for transport. We also have systems which can generate heat and electricity from sunshine – this is the area I work in. The big problem with most of these is that you can’t control when they happen and they don’t necessarily produce energy when we need them. Hydrogen is an option for storing the energy, so that we have it when we need it – it’s also a good option for transport. Batteries might be another option!
Fusion is another possibility – people are working on this, but the most optimist estimates for getting energy out of fusion is about 15 years – it will take even longer to make energy on a commercial scale.