A l t e r n a t i v e

R e s o u r c e s

Alternative Resources - Costa Rica
BY: Sofia Alemparte, Mariana Sobrado and Gabriela Posada

Some alternative resources are:
Solar, wind, hydroelectric, ocean
If we start using alternative resources it’s going to help our environment and global warming.
Right now there are many projects about alternative resources like:
ARI – Monduli Alternative Resources Income for Monduli Women

These are some suggestions for alternative resources:
To warm a pool if you have one instead of using all of those machines you could use solar power or using electric cars instead of gas cars. Another thing is using a small car instead of the big cars.
Alternative resources: solar energy
Solar energy works by heat and electricity. The solar energy has been working for billions of years. In 1830 a British astronomer, John Herschel used solar energy collector box. Solar power can also be used to make electricity. The process is called photovoltaic. We can use solar power in 2 different ways: a heat source and as an energy source. People have used the sun as a heat source of thousands of years. Today more than 10, 000 families get all of their electricity from solar power.
Wind energy

There are some wind turbines in many places that by the wind give energy and make some things work the only bad is that they have discovered that bats have died because they don’t see the things. It is caused by a heating of the earth’s surface by the sun. Wind power is the conversion of wind energy into a use full form such as electricity using many wind turbines. Wind energy has historically been used for propel sailing ships. Wind power along with solar power is endlessness resources. Wind power doesn’t pollute the earth. When the wind power turns the blades of a windmill, it spins a turbine inside a small generation to produce electricity.
Ocan power:
Only about 20 locations have good inlets and a large enough tidal range, about 10 fits. Wave are caused by the wind blowing on the ocean surface.This is a tremendous energy in the ocean waves.  The west coast of U.S. and Europe and the coast of Japan and of New Zealand are good  sites for harnessing wave energy. On way to harness wave energy is to bend or focus the wave into a narrow  channel  increasing there  power and size. There are no  big commercial wave ocean plant energy.

These is the procured of a solar power in a house.

 These are the wind males that send us by cables the energy.

These are what people use to get energy from the ocean.

Alternative Resources - México

WIND ENERGY

You can make energy with wind by using some very big wind turbines.   Many farmers use this form of energy to generate electricity on their farms. It is a very good invention for the environment .The first wind turbines were in Europe. They were huge; they were the biggest of all times.

Wind power plants or wind farms as they are sometimes called, are clusters of wind machines scattered over a large area. The world’s largest wind farm, the Horse Hollow Wind Energy is in the center of Texas. It has 421 wind turbines that generate enough electricity to power 220,000 homes per year. 

The wind machines found in these power plants work by catching wind and spinning its large blades. A generator behind the blades changes the mechanical energy into electricity.

SOLAR ENERGY

Solar energy is energy we get from the sun. The earth gets light from the sun. At times parts of the earth has no light. That is when it is night. We have many sources of energy but the strongest source of energy is solar energy. 

Solar energy can be converted into other forms of energy, such as heat and electricity. Solar energy can be converted to electricity in two ways:

• Photovoltaic (PV devices) or “solar cells” – change sunlight directly into electricity. PV systems are often used in remote locations that are not connected to the electric grid.  They are also used to power watches, calculators, and lighted road signs.
• Solar Power Plants - indirectly generate electricity when the heat from solar thermal collectors is used to heat a fluid which produces steam that is used to power generator. Out of the 15 known solar electric generating units operating in the United States at the end of 2006, 10 of these are in California, and 5 in Arizona. No statistics are being collected on solar plants that produce less than 1 megawatt of electricity, so there may be smaller solar plants in a number of other states.

The major disadvantages of solar energy are:

• The amount of sunlight that arrives at the earth's surface is not constant. It depends on location, time of day, time of year, and weather conditions.
• Because the sun doesn't deliver that much energy to any one place at any one time, a large surface area is required to collect the energy at a useful rate.

RAIN

Rain creates evaporation that turns into cloud and it continues in this cycle. Recovering the energy from the impact of a raindrop of water when it drops down is a form of alternative power. To measure such energy, it is possible to build a rain catcher which would allow the control of the amount of water falling on top of a piezoelectric material, in this case made out of polyvinylidene fluoride. A piezoelectric material is a material that is able to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy . Research into the development of this kind of energy shows slow falling droplets produce more energy than high falling droplets.

TIDES

The second way we use water to create electricity is by the changing of tides. Tidal power plants work on the power of changing tides.  The first step in the construction of a tidal power plant is in finding a bay with a large difference between it's low and high tides.  Engineers then design a dam to put across the outer end of the bay. When high tide comes to the area, huge quantities of water come rushing into the bay.  The gates in the dam will shut when the water level has reached it's maximum height.  At low tide, the water in the bay is trapped higher than the ocean water.  Holes in the bottom of the dam let the water rush past turbines and then back into the ocean.  When the next high tide comes around, the whole process begins over again.

GEOTHERMAL HEAT

This is energy generated from heat stored in the earth, or the collection of absorbed heat derived from underground.  The largest group of geothermal power plants in the world is located at The Geysers a geothermal field in California.

Geothermal power requires no fuel, and is therefore virtually emissions free and insusceptible to fluctuations in fuel cost. And because a geothermal power station doesn't rely on transient sources of energy, unlike, for example, wind turbines or solar panels, its capacity factor can be quite large; up to 90% in practice.

Alternative Resources Information: http://home.utah.edu/~ptt25660/tran.html

Rodolfo and Gabriel did this page, Mexico