Technology Basics

Wind Energy

Wind power is an affordable, efficient and inexhaustible source of electricity. It's pollution-free and cost-competitive with energy from new coal- and gas-fired power plants. In 2010, nearly 3,000 turbines went up across the United States, and today, American wind generates enough electricity to power more than 10 million homes, creates steady income for investors and landowners, and helps support more than 100,000 manufacturing and ongoing operations and maintenance jobs.

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Solar Energy

In the last few decades, technological leaps and the scaled-up production of solar panels have made solar power dramatically less expensive. What started as a technology used to power satellites, telescopes and other vehicles in outer space is now used in homes, office buildings and warehouses. In some parts of the country, huge solar farms cover acres of land. By the end of the decade, solar energy could become cheaper than conventional electricity in many parts of the country, and the continued growth of the industry could create hundreds of thousands of American jobs.

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Biomass Energy and Cellulosic Ethanol

Biomass energy comes from plant materials -- things like wood waste, corn kernels, or non-food "energy" crops, which can be used to make liquid fuels, heat or electricity. Biomass accounts for roughly half of all the renewable energy produced in the United States. Our challenge is to ensure that we produce biomass energy in ways that reduce global warming pollution, protect the environment, and do not impact the global food market. In other words, biomass energy should do the job better than the fossil fuel energy it replaces.

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Biogas Energy

Biogas comes from animal manure, and is perhaps the ultimate win-win energy source, allowing farmers to produce their own electricity and reduce the water contamination, odor pollution, and global warming emissions caused by animal waste. The EPA's AgSTAR program reported in 2010 that about 8,000 U.S. farms could support biogas recovery systems, providing about 1,600 megawatts of energy and reducing emissions of global warming pollution by about 1.8 million metric tons of methane -- the equivalent of taking 6.5 million cars off the road.

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Geothermal Energy

Geothermal energy comes from reservoirs of steam and hot water beneath the earth's surface. It is among the least explored sources of renewable energy in the United States. In 2010, geothermal energy produced just over 3,000 megawatts of energy, or less than half a percent of the electricity used in this country. Today nearly 200 geothermal projects, with a total capacity of about 7,800 megawatts, are in various stages of development, largely in the West.

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Caution: Non-Renewable Energy Sources that Claim to be Renewable

Several types of energy resources and specific technologies used to capture these resources claim to be renewable, despite either relying on dirty fossil fuel energy resources or creating other pollution hazards in the process. Following are three often-cited resources whose proponents claim are renewable but in fact they are not:

• Coal waste from coal mining
• Methane gas from coal mines
• Waste-to-Energy (WTE) facilities, i.e. waste incineration