Suppose you wake up one morning and there is no heat or electricity in your house. When your parents go to fill up the car with gas, all of the gas stations are closed—permanently.
Sound like a nightmare? It could happen. Fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) are nonrenewable energy sources. What we use today is gone forever. That’s one reason why it’s important to develop other sources of energy. Another reason is that burning fossil fuels releases harmful pollutants into the atmosphere.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that for several years, people have been experimenting with energy sources other than fossil fuels. Some of them are as old as the Sun; others are as young as the twenty-first century. Here’s just a sampling.
