The Big Picture:

When you use the description 'Renewable Energy' in conversation almost every speaker and listener will carry a set of assumptions about what the term means and the context for why it is important or not. The conversation around renewable energy has changed dramatically over my lifetime so it seems important to spend a moment laying that context.

In the begining:

In the 1970's there was an oil shock in the United States that is sometimes referred to and the Energy Crisis. I remember long lines (0.5 km or longer) as people waited to get a few gallons of gasoline. Like most large scale events its roots are complex but in simple terms the US was importing most of the oil used to manufacture gasoline and the nations who were producing that oil shut down production and shipments to the US. At the time oil production in the US was declining and there was a dramatic sense of insecurity created by our dependence on external sources of petroleum. This led to a national effort to find alternative sources of energy that were within our borders and were not a limited resource. This led to the original push for renewable energy. In the 80's this took the form of passive solar housing along with early experiments with solar panels and wind turbines. A large national laboratory currently called the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) was formed (initially they were known as the Solar Energy Research Institute - SERI) to help drive this effort forward. We will use many resources generated for the public by NREL in this class. They represent a remarkable national effort much like NASA and all that they do is freely shared with the public.

Energy Independence:

Over the last several decades there have been two major threads in the renewable energy discussion. One of these was influenced by growing concerns about greenhouse gases (global climate change wasn't a thing yet). The other was the idea of energy independence. Renewable energy sources were inherently distributed (they exist everywhere on the globe in one form or another) rather than local and offered the possibility of self reliance from an energy resource perspective. This perspective was influenced by the reality that one of the major economic imbalances in some countries was driven by the need to import oil from the limited number of large producers. There was also a lot of discussion in this period about the ultimate finiteness of the fossil fuels that formed the backbone of all 1st World economies. Economic and resource analysis developed a model for the supply of any physical resource known as the Hubbert Peak Theory which notes that any given local resource has a consistent bell shaped curve that describes how much of the resource is extracted over time. This led to worries at the time that oil might run out before the end of the 20th century. There could be a whole class about just this topic but we will merely note that the basic idea has been shown to be valid though new oil fields or methods for extracting oil have been found which has extended the life of the oil industry. It is probably important to note that one of the predictions of Hubbert Peak Theory is the future sources of a given resource would be generally of lower quality and have higher extraction costs and side effects. This has largely been validated over the last 20 years.

More Recently:

In the lifetime of most students at COCC global climate change and specifically anthropogenic drivers for that change have become a major force in our lives. While this class is NOT specifically motivated by the climate change discussion we will accept the scientific basis for concerns about human factors driving the models of climate change. We can certainly have a separate discussion about that scientific basis at some point during class but for now we will take it as a given. The human production of greenhouse gases provides a compelling reason to explore renewable energy sources which do not directly produce such greenhouse gases.

Sustainability Without the Hot Air:

The text for this class (we will talk about this more in the next breadcrumb) is dedicated to the vision that regardless of why you are thinking about renewable energy it is critically important that you do so with numerical clarity and integrity. David MacKay (who wrote the book in 2010) was a physicist at Cambridge who was committed to the idea that ideas without numbers to back them up are just 'codswallop'. A particular example of codswallop is the assertion that we should all unplug our wall chargers when we are not using them to save energy and hence the planet. Unfortunately the charger uses about 1W of power when it's plugged in but not charging anything. That represents 24 Wh over a day and your personal energy use, as we will find out, is about 250,000 Wh each day. This tiny amount of energy is not solving anything but you can't tell until you look at and understand the numbers!

This is our goal in this class, to understand the numbers and where they come from so you can have better conversations and arguments with your friends and family.

What is Science?

Because this is a science class we would be wise to consider what science is in it's most general sense. I know you have heard or 'learned' a variety of definitions of science. This video from Tim Minchin has lots of useful life lessons as well as one of the best articulations of what science is that I have experienced. It is consistent with what we will do. This is also one of the best commencement addresses I have heard. Enjoy....just the first 12 minutes!

 

So...

"... science is not a body of knowledge or a belief system, it is just a term that describes humankind's incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome. The arts and sciences need to work together to improve how knowledge is communicated." ~ Tim Minchin

You'll notice this definition says nothing about truth or rightness or answers or facts. This is what we will endeavor (humbly) to do this term, incrementally improve our understanding of renewable energy and the role it might play in our lives....or not.

HW: Big Picture

Answer the following questions and submit to assignment on LMS:

Do you think renewable energy is important? Why?

What makes a source of energy renewable? Is nuclear energy renewable?

Ultimately does any energy source last 'forever'?

Assignment: HW: Big Picture

Complete and assemble your solutions to all the HW problems (3 questions) listed here showing all the steps in your solutions. Scan to a pdf and turn in on LMS. Please review HW format expectations for guidance about your homework solutions.

Reading Ahead:

Read the breadcrumb called Getting Started. This lays out the general structure of class and expectations for your involvement and effort.