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An introduction to energy resources
Energy resources are essential for any society, be it one dependent on subsistence farming or an industrialised country. There are many different sources of energy, some well-known such as coal or petroleum, others less so, such as tides or the heat inside the Earth. Is nuclear power a salvation or a nightmare? This free course, An introduction to energy resources, provides background information to each, so that you can assess them for yourself.
Course learning outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:
- understand the difference between energy and power, and their units and prefixes
- state the relative contributions of different natural energy sources to the global energy budget
- describe the contribution of photosynthesis to the carbon cycle, and distinguish the terrestrial and marine parts of the cycle
- discuss the issues involved in concentrating, storing and transporting energy
- recognise which energy resources have a low energy density, and which have a high energy density.
First Published: 09/08/2012
Updated: 08/05/2019
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2) However, an update is required, e.g., section 4.6 references the '2002' energy consumption figure of 451 EJ, whilst the IEA provides 650 EJ for 2024.
Similarly, 2.2, figure 1.6 has a 2000 dated graphic; perhaps a more recent graphic could be used from the UK Government's 'Digest of UK Energy Statistics Annual data for UK' (DUKES) 2026 reports.
3) The loss of the OU web site, due to the recent installation of the 2 critical PHP patches, obviously prevented access to the online glossary (which would usually have been contained within the MS Word document for all of the courses that I have previously taken). Indeed, I have found that it is safest to download all OpenLearn sourced material in case a course is removed at a later date (you might be surprised how often this happens).