Question: is there a way to make a new sustainable, economic, and environmentally friendly energy souce?

Bruce Alexander answered on 20 Jun 2012:

There are plenty of ways of making new, sustainable and environmentally friendly energy sources. Solar cells, hydrogen, fuel cells, rechargeable batteries, thermoelectric materials that turn waste heat into electricity all depend on materials science to perform well. Biofuels also have a part to play. Why we do not see more of these is due to the word “economic”. To adopt any new technology, there has to be a clear incentive for people to change what they are using now and do what you want them to. So, why are all our cars run on petrol/diesel? Mostly it is because it is the cheapest thing for us to buy (a litre of petrol can cost less than a litre of bottled water!). We either need to lower the cost of alternatives or wait until a point where petrol is so expensive that we have to do something else.

This is not new.

The oil crisis in the 1970s sent the oil prices through the roof. As a result, Brasil converted a large portion of their cars to run on ethanol that came from fermented sugar cane. This was purely an economic decision, not an environmental one.