Sustainable development becomes more and more important in recent years, since bold actions are necessary to ensure the needs of future generations. Using renewable sources for producing energy plays an important role to achieve sustainable development. Major global issues like depletion of sources and environmental concerns triggers the rapid development of these clean energy production systems. This paper focuses on the current status and future potentials of different renewable energy sources by considering various quantitative and qualitative factors that may affect the capabilities and significance of renewable energy systems such as the potential for power generation, availability issues, carbon dioxide emissions, capital costs, land requirements and social impacts. Furthermore, some of those factors are used for making comparisons between different technologies and systems, which are also discussed in the paper. The results and discussions reveal that these systems provide promising opportunities for people to access cheap, reliable and clean energy in the future, which is one of the key elements to sustain healthy ecosystems and human life. The recommendations and conclusions presented here will be beneficial to engineers, researchers, city planners and energy policy makers.