Elements of Renewable Energy MOOC

Week1guide
Professor Godfrey Boyle: Hello and welcome to Week 1 of Elements of Renewable Energy. During
the next four weeks using the materials on this course plus online discussions and the opportunity
to share your thoughts with other learners we're going to learn a great deal about renewable energy.
Our journey begins with the Earth.
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.