Renewable & Nonrenewable Energy Resources (Differences & Worksheet)

The difference between Renewable Energy Resources and Nonrenewable Energy Resources is that Renewables get replenished by nature quickly while Nonrenewables take millions of years to regenerate. Solar, Wind, and Hydro are examples of Renewable Energy Resources while Petroleum, Coal, and Natural Gas are examples of Nonrenewable Energy Resources.

Humans need energy for cooking, traveling, keeping warm during the cold, lighting, operating devices, and manufacturing things we need. Thus it is important to find sustainable and cheap renewable energy resources for our usage now and in the future.

Renewable Energy Resources: Definition and Examples

Renewable resources are resources that are restored by the Nature over short periods of time. This type of resource is much better to use because often a resource renews so fast that it will have restored by the time we have used it up.

Solar energy is a resource as the sun is ever shining, and the solar energy never runs out.

Wind Energy

Wind energy is another renewable resource. We can’t stop the wind from blowing so it’s ever present, which makes it a renewable resource.

Plants are also used to grow for food and manufacture products. They are also renewable resources. Trees used for timber and furniture, cotton used for clothes and fabric and food crops, such as corn and wheat, rice, millet, are planted and re grown after the harvest is done.

Animals are also a renewable resource because, like plants, we can breed them to increase their population. Livestock, like cows, pigs and chickens, all are renewable resources.

Water

Water is a very important renewable resource. We can never really use up all the water in the world, but we also can’t have more. There is water on Earth, In various forms – as a liquid ….the oceans, a solid our polar ice caps and glaciers and a gas as clouds and water vapor.

Water is used to get hydroelectric power, which we get from water flowing through dams. This is renewable resource. Here just the flowing water is used as a mechanism to generate electricity. Like the sun and wind, the resource is used just the way it is without us making any changes or doing any work.

Biofuels also known as biogas 

Biofuels are resources made from living organisms –that is biological fuels. Ethanol is a biofuel because it comes from corn. Biodiesel is vehicle fuel made from vegetable oil, and there are certain cars that run on used oil from restaurants!

Firewood

Firewood, animal dung and peat is used to burn for heat and cooking mostly in rural and mountainous areas. They are a result of dead or decaying matter of living organisms.

Nonrenewable Energy Resources: Defintion and Examples

Non-renewable energy are sources that will eventually run out and will not be restored in our lifetimes or even in many, many lifetimes as for these it takes millions of years to form.

Mostly non-renewable energy sources are fossil fuels: coal, petroleum, and natural gas.

Carbon is the main element in fossil fuels. It took around 300 million years ago for fossil fuels to form and that time period is called the Carboniferous Period.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, even the time before the dinosaurs, Earth had a different continental and oceanic structure. It was covered with wide, seas and rainforests.