Week 1: Introducing renewable energy

Welcome to Week 1. In this first week we introduce you to the wide variety of renewable energy sources. But first we begin by looking at the environmental concerns that have given rise to recent interest in renewables. We also introduce you to some basic energy terms and concepts to help you understand the subject.

We begin by looking at the sun, that enormous energy source that powers most of the renewables, either directly in the form of heat, light or electricity or indirectly in the form of bioenergy, hydropower, wind or wave power. We also look at two non-solar renewables, geothermal energy and tidal power.

We then move on to look briefly at energy supply and demand, first on a world scale and then on the much smaller scale of the UK. Then we look at the problem of global climate change largely caused by emissions of planet warming greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. It’s now widely accepted that the world needs to phase out fossil fuels and phase in low and zero carbon energy sources such as renewables.

We follow this with an overview of the main solar and non-solar based renewals. We then look at current European and UK targets for increasing the share of renewables in the energy mix by 2020 to 2030. We discuss the UK government’s Electricity Market Reform measures and we look at the UK Climate Change Committee’s estimates of the contributions renewables could make to UK energy needs by 2030.

We conclude this week with a case study in the form of three short video segments of Scotland’s ambitious aim to produce 100% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.