How Clean is Clean Energy?

Clean renewable energy investments have been on for a while although, with the advent of covid-19, it rose across industries and countries all around the world. Having properties such as low carbon emissions, little or no environmental pollution, and sustainable resources, clean energy seems like the best thing that ever happened in energy development.

Globally, the amount of CO₂ emissions decreased by 2.37 per cent from 2019 to 2020. It is being suggested as a good way to generate the much-needed energy and overturn climate change and global warming. This energy is derived via renewable sources (find out more) and do not create harm to the environment. The major clean energy sources are solar, wind, hydro, biomass, and geothermal. Nuclear energy is also regarded as a clean energy source however, it produces some radioactive substances.

 Is clean energy really clean?

The table below shows the average amount of CO₂ emitted for every Giga-Watt hour of electricity generated by the various energy sources.

Source: WNA Report

Clean energy sources on average produce much fewer emissions in comparison to other conventional fossil sources like coal and natural gas.

One may ask how solar PV generates CO₂ emissions? Well, solar PV does not produce CO₂ emissions while being used, rather its associated emission arises during the production of the materials needed in the production of solar panels.

Wind and hydroelectric generation, on the other hand, produces little to no CO₂ emissions. In hydroelectric plants, decomposing organic matter emits methane, a gas that is 34 times more potent than CO₂. Furthermore, burning biomass for electricity generation also generates CO₂, but the photosynthetic processes from plants grown for this specific purpose capture a large amount of emitted carbon resulting in more or less zero net emission.

Finally, with the proliferation of clean energy and innovative recycling technology, future solar projects (learn more) would produce fewer emissions. Although the development and operation of clean energy sources do not involve ‘zero’ emissions as one may think, these sources in time pay back their energy debt, by generating way cleaner energy when compared to fossil generation sources therefore, clean energy might not yet be squeaky clean, but it’s the next best thing for now.