difference between perpetual natural resources and renewable natural resources.
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Answer:
What is the difference between a perpetual energy source and a renewable energy source?
A renewable energy source is one that is replenished (at a fast enough time scale to be useful) without us needing to do anything to replenish it. Solar energy is the simplest example. Solar energy is streaming past the Earth continually, day in and day out, whether we use it or not and there is no way we can use it all up because more follows immediately and is expected to do so for so long that we will presumably be extinct long before it runs out.
(Note, that doesn’t mean it is literally free energy because we still have to capture it before it can be used.)
A clear contrast is coal.
There will probably never be any more coal. Not only did it take tens of millions of years to form, but the conditions that allowed it to form no longer exist. Most of the world’s coal was laid down in the carboniferous period about 185 million years ago. That was different from today in a few key ways, but the main one is that trees had recently evolved a new component called lignin, which makes the wood hard and allowed tall, upright trees for the first time instead of only shrubs and firm grasses etc. But the microbes that can digest lignin did not evolve for quite a long time afterwards. That meant that an enormous amount of wood lay around on forest floors in big piles, breaking down only very slowly if at all, and was eventually covered over with silt where it was subjected to the pressure and enormous amounts of time that allowed it to turn into coal. That cannot happen now because wood is biodegraded much more quickly.
So when we burn coal, we are simply using it up. The supply is not being replenished and if we carried on long enough we would effectively use it all up. That makes it non-renewable.
(Note, climate policies should mean we don’t come close to that point, but in principle it’s what would happen.)
The term “perpetual energy” is usually used in the context of a perpetual energy machine, which is a machine in which one component is driven by the action of another, which is in turn driven by the first component, and along the way energy is extracted by a further component in the chain putting a load to act against the driving of the machine.
These kinds of machines are all fictional or in design form only because in practice any machine built to work that way will only run on the momentum given to it by starting it up, and will quickly wind down just through friction. Adding a load acting against will stop it even more quickly.
Designs like this were popular in the early days of classical mechanics, as newcomers to the field discovered one after the other that Newton’s laws of equal and opposite reaction and conservation of energy etc., are brutal dictators
Answer:
Nonrenewable energy resources, like coal, nuclear, oil, and natural gas, are available in limited supplies. This is usually due to the long time it takes for them to be replenished. Renewable resources are replenished naturally and over relatively short periods of time.
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