🌞 Technical Drawbacks: Generation!

Another drawback of electricity is that it isn't a primary source of energy. Primary sources of energy are sources of energy that exist in their natural state around us and can be used directly. Examples of primary sources are:

• Coal
• Wood
• Moving Water
• Sunlight
• Uranium
• Geothermal

Electricity, however, is not a source of energy itself -- there aren't huge reserves of electricity sitting around in our world waiting for us to collect them. Instead, we have to generate electricity by converting some other type of energy into electricity so that we can harness its power. That makes it a secondary source of energy!

While this isn’t necessarily bad, it does mean that we have to find ways to generate (and store) electricity from some type of primary source.  That requires complex, expensive technology, which is difficult to install and maintain!

Photo by Sungrow EMEA on Unsplash

And like storing energy, generating it is often not a very efficient process.  For example, one of the current drawbacks to solar power is that it’s less than 25% efficient—which means that even using the best technology we currently available to us, we waste over three-fourths of the solar energy that could be turned into electricity!

And that points to another breakthrough waiting for a brilliant new insight from you—super-efficient solar cells, wind or geothermal generators!