Car's Gas Tank Increased Fuel Costs

It's shocking how much it costs to fill a car's gas tank these days. Increased fuel costs are having an impact on almost every aspect of life. Food costs and other physical product prices are inflated due to increases in transportation and shipping. For those who drive, a majority of Americans, disposable income is decreased. It is hard to find a silver lining in all that.

However, there is one positive side effect. Just like in the gas crunch of the 1980s, the steep cost of fuel has turned the public's eyes back toward alternative energy and sustainable energy. In other words, the pain of fuel prices has exceeded the complacency. There is now an increased interest in fossil fuel alternatives.

Renewable energy is most often defined as the ability to generate energy in the present without compromising that ability of future generations to generate energy. It most often refers to using natural energy sources which replenish themselves. Unlike oil, which will eventually be consumed entirely, other sources, like sunlight, wind, rain, and tides will last as long as the planet does.

Solar power involves harnessing sunlight to either generate electricity or heat water. The effectiveness of solar power varies depending on climate and geography. However, that issue can be overcome by feeding the national electric grid from areas with suitable characteristics. For individual home owners, the main disadvantage of solar is the up front, installation costs which can be quite high, even though the long term savings and tax breaks can totally offset the initial expenditure within the life of the solar power system.

With the recent introduction of electric cars and electric cars with gas back up generators, solar energy now has the potential to replace the majority of gas use in non-commercial vehicles. The current generation of such vehicles will run eighty to one hundred miles per charge. The average American drives less than forty miles per day with work commuting.

Using windmills to generate electricity is a spin off of a thousand year old technology that uses windmills to pump water. It has different but similar geographic limitations to solar power. However, windmill farms in mountain passes can generate power for the national grid just as desert solar farms.

As far as water goes, technology has come a long way since the hydro-electric dam. That's still a very valid technology that has been around for a long time. Today, research is under way to use the wave action of the ocean to generate electricity with a buoy system.

The clear theme here is that renewable energy technology has been in use for quite some time. However, only the recent pain of high fuel costs have motivated consumers to turn away from the far more convenient fossil fuels. All growth comes with some discomfort.