Electricity

Electricity or Electric Power is the manipulation of electric charges for human purposes, such as lighting, heating and enabling the use of complex machinery. Someone who works on these manipulations is called an electrician or sparky.

Electric Power Generation Methods

Hydro

See Also: Anti-Dam Movements

Hydroelectric power, or water power in general, involves taking advantage of water that has been raised due to evaporation by the sun, and deposited on high ground. As it then flows back towards the ocean, its potential energy can be tapped by turbines or water wheels, which are usually built into dams to increase the drop.

Advantages include:

• It's by far the cheapest source of energy. At less than a third the cost of fossil fuels.
• It is relatively clean, once the equipment has been built and installed
• The technology is relatively simple and very robust, meaning it doesn't require anywhere close to the maintenance and knowledge base required for, say, a nuclear plant.
• If you need a flood control dam it is very cheap and low impact to add electricity generators to it (at least compared with leaving the dam without turbines)
• Creation of artificial lakes upstream of the dams, to be used for recreation, wildlife preserves, or potable water supplies
• Can slow erosion, such as the case of Niagara Falls, where the falls are "turned off" when the tourists aren't watching and diverted to the hydro plant
• Supplies power on demand (actually about the most responsive power source on any grid)
• Doesn't need significant electricity or power to start, making it useful for black starts.
• By installing pumps that return water upstream, the dam can act like a gigantic battery - in fact this is the cheapest most reliable and most efficient large scale energy storage in existence. This is incidentally one of the major uses for artificial lakes in the Alpine countries and Scandinavia.
• The only renewable proven to be able to take significant market share away from fossil fuels
• Old mine shafts can be used as reservoirs for pump based water power (primarily used for energy storage)

Disadvantages include:

• Flooding of landscapes, causing a disruption of ecosystems.
• Displacement of residents and burial underwater of important cultural landmarks.
• Limited by geography. In most developed countries, all the good spots are already taken.
• The flooded vegetation and soil decomposes anaerobically to methane, a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. which causes further global warming. Of course cutting down trees before flooding and similar measures can somewhat reduce that, but it is rarely done.
• The failure of a dam can be disastrous. Large dam failures rank among the most deadly industrial accidents in history.
• Dams are targets for military or terrorist activity.
• Hydroelectric dams pose barriers to migrating fish. This can be remedied to some extent by constructing fish ladders.
• As any Geo-scientist worth their salt will tell you: Artificial lakes tend to silt up. Depending on the amount of sediment the river brings from upstream, this can be an alarmingly rapid process (as is the case with Lake Nasser on the Nile) or hardly perceptible on human timescales. Eventually the river "wants to" fill up all artificial lakes to the level of the dam.
• Large mostly stagnant bodies of water can be breeding grounds for mosquitoes and other bugs. Mosquitoes are vector for some of the deadliest diseases known to humanity, including Malaria, Dengue (for which neither cure nor vaccine exists), Yellow fever, Zika or West Nile.
• The sheer weight of the water in a reservoir may have an effect on earthquakes and possibly the rotation of the Earth itself.

Oil

It is possible to get electricity from oil by

Wind

Although only 3% of the world's power comes from the wind, some European countries produce a lot more. The heaviest user is Denmark at 39% in 2014, followed by Spain's 11.5% in 2009 (and 40% on a good day).