What are the differences between non-renewable energy renewable energy and inexhaustible energy?

Answer 1

Renewable sources of energy can be recreated to replace used-up amounts (e.g. we can grow more trees), but that means they can still be used up and lost to us without renewal programs to replace what is being used (e.g., planting programs to continually grow new trees).

Non-renewable resources (coal, oil, uranium) can be stretched out and husbanded, but will eventually run out. We don't have technology to rapidly make new fossil fuels (they take millions of years to be created), for example.

Inexhaustible resources are often lumped in with renewable resources. However they differ as they will be there as long as they are there, we can neither use them up nor replace them as they diminish, since they don't diminish. For example, we will have inexhaustible amounts of energy from the sun, as long as we have the sun (for the next several million years). As we use solar energy, the light from the sun does not grow more dim. Another example is that gravity does not diminish as we use it to move water to turn turbines and create energy. No one feels lighter because Niagara falls uses up too much gravity pulling the water down to turn the turbines.

Examples of each type of energy:

Renewable: biomass and bio-fuel from trees, plants, manure and landfill gas

Non-renewable: coal, oil, natural gas, uranium

Inexhaustible: wind, hydroelectric (essentially gravity power that moves water downhill in rivers, springs, and falls which is inexhaustible as long as the evaporative effect of the sun and water creates more rain to get it back uphill to move down again), tidal motion (another form of gravity's power, but a more complex interplay of the force of gravity of the Earth and Moon along with the spinning of the Earth on its axis pulling on masses of ocean waters in different directions at different times), solar*, geothermal and even Tesla's bizarre universal energy (if it exists) would fall into this group.

*Note: most, if not all, of our forms of inexhaustible energy can actually be traced back to different effects of the sun on Earth's physical properties, i.e, geothermal, hydroelectric, and even wind are caused by these effects of the sun.