by Gadiel McGarrean

Created on: August 12, 2008   Last Updated: July 31, 2011

Renewable energy is all the buzz. Three less popular types of renewable energy are Geothermal, Microbe Produced Fuels, and Space-based solar. While geothermal has gained recent popularity, few know about microbe produced fuels or Space-based solar and their advantages, the following paragraphs will illustrate all three

Geothermal energy is possibly one of the most accessible possibilities to our growing energy needs. With geothermal energy, the way power is produced is you take the earths natural heat from its crust to turn water into steam and turn turbines with that steam which produces energy. One of the draw-backs with this is not everyone has an easily accessible source of heat from the earth's crust. While in some places, such as Hawaii, where active volcanoes exist, you have a very obvious and easily visible source of heat - the vents for the volcano, in some places the heat is not so ready for the picking. For these places there is an answer, engineered geothermal systems.

Essentially what happens is you make a hole in the ground that goes down far enough to feel the heat of the earth, and put two parallel pipes in the ground, which are then connected at the bottom. You run cold water though the first pipe and it comes out the second, as steam. What you now have is energy. It was free, and you didn't make any CO2 in the process (beyond what the system itself makes naturally). This can be done anywhere, the only difference is how deep the hole has to be to reach the heat of the earths crust. Which can vary a lot in some places, but it will not usually prevent this from being economically feasible, except in some rare cases (the top of Mount Everest, the Rockies, etc).

Microbe created fuels are essentially hydrocarbon fuels created by microorganisms. The way it works is the organisms are engineered to secrete hydrocarbon fuels, in a field treehugger.com describes as "synthetic biology". The organisms are said to produce fuels with greater energy efficiency and at lower cost.

This process works similarly to the way that decaying matter creates methane, except that the microorganisms are rearranged chemically and genetically to produce liquid fuels instead. LS9 was the first company that was able to make microorganisms to secrete fuels, according to treehugger.com. These organisms are said to not just produce gasoline but diesel and jet fuel as well, according to treehugger.com.

This is a startling development for oil explorers, as money is being burned

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