Currently, what proportion of our energy requirements is met by renewable energy sources?

Question

Is anyone aware of the current level of contributions from renewable energy sources towards the total energy needs of the world?

Answer 1

There is a significant reliance of 13 percent of the energy requirements on Renewable sources.

Comments

Your animations are always awesome and beautiful. Great work Ted-Ed

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Renewables are great and we should keep developing and producing them. However, because of the issues mentioned in the content (among others), we should also be building new nuclear plants. They're also a very clean power source and with current technology could provide for all of our power needs.

Either way, this stuff just needs to get us by until fusion power is sorted out. Then that will be the only power source we need.

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renewable energy requires fossil energy. At least for the moment.

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I liked the content, but it ignores the impact that renewable energies have on the ecosystems.

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Thankfully, a lot of progress has been made since this content was released. One exciting development is the technology to drill deeper than we've ever drilled before to make geothermal energy accessible nearly anywhere we want it. Another is the rapid expansion of solar powered homes with suitable storage batteries. I think "renewable" is a misnomer, but geothermal and solar and wind are safely described as "inexhaustible." Geothermal plants can replace nearly every coal-fired plant in the world. Nearly every building can become both a solar and a wind farm as technology develops. Transportation may need to evolve to either run on electrically powered tracks or nuclear powered flight. And some of us may rediscover the beauty and efficiency of Pedal Power...

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me doing an assignment abt renewable energy: im not going to copy from any website
TED-ed: posts content
also me: reading subtitles and copying them into my power point presentation

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Two huge problems either touched on or ignored in this commentary: cost of building so many turbines or solar panels, and the absolute volume of raw materials needed. Both are more than prohibitive. I also noted that Nuclear, the largest supplier of emission-free, green power, wasn't mentioned, even though it can easily be configured to be a renewable energy source as well (you can produce more fuel than you consume--making it more renewable than wind and solar in absolute terms).

If we want to break dependence on fossil fuel, we have to massive increase our investment and use of nuclear energy technologies. I'd love to see TedEd talk about that.