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Natural gas is used primarily to provide heating (furnaces, incinerators, domestic uses such as water heaters, ovens and clothes dryers) and to produce a substantial percentage of the nation's electricity. It is currently also used as one of the minor transportation fuels. So how can renewable energy sources reduce this burden on natural gas?

To answer this, we must first understand something about what renewable and alternative energy sources currently exist that are viable replacements for natural gas. These include solar energy, fuel alcohols, hydropower, wind power, geothermal, and biofuels.

Solar energy: This encompasses more than just rooftop heat collectors and silicon solar cell panels that generate electricity. While advances in materials and engineering over the past few decades have made these better investments and more efficient and flexible, their cost still prohibits their widespread adoption; the time-to-payback is still much longer than other options, although this has shortened, and consumers are beginning to give other considerations, like environmental impact, a higher priority than before. Solar energy also includes using sunlight to generate heat directly: there is a program underway in the southwest that is using solar concentrator dishes to heat Stirling-cycle engines - basically a steam-locomotive-type piston that uses hot, expanding air instead of steam as the motive fluid. These power generators that make electricity, and they generate no emissions - but are only suitable for use in areas with high insolation (the average amount of sunlight falling on a given area). In a broader sense, 'solar energy' also includes the non-visible portions of the spectrum that strikes the Earth's surface (infrared, ultraviolet), which we currently make little or no use of. And in this broader sense, the generation of biomass is also directly dependent on 'solar energy'.

Fuel alcohols: The press has generated much attention lately about ethanol and its potential to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. While most of the benefit is seen to be in the transportation sector, ethanol as a burnable fuel could still be a replacement for natural gas in some applications. The main impediment to this is still economic: it is still far more expensive to create and transport ethanol to the user than it is for natural gas, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. Additionally, just as in the case of ethanol as a replacement for gasoline, there is the issue of

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