Sustainable Energy

Catalog description

Humans’ ability to generate energy on a large-scale from fossil fuels enabled the industrial revolution, and therefore marks the beginning of the Modern era. Today, in the developed world (and increasingly in emerging economies) energy in its different forms is used for nearly everything: from heating and cooling to manufacturing, trading, cooking, commuting, communicating and more. In other words – we have become an energy dependent society. At the same time, more than 70% of the anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHG) are emitted by our energy system, making it the greatest man-made contributor to climate change. Hence, mitigating climate change and becoming a sustainable low carbon society imply some socio-techno-economic fundamental changes to our energy systems. These changes include a sharp increase in the deployment and use of low carbon and renewable energy sources; a much greater efficiency of energy production and consumption; the development of new energy storage technologies; as well as the development of innovative demand side management programs. The course will introduce the students to the fundamentals of the 21st century energy world and the challenges it faces. The following topics will be covered: technologies of energy production and consumption; conventional and non-conventional fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas, gas shales, oil shales and tar sands); nuclear energy (fission and fusion); renewable sources (biomass, geothermal, hydro, ocean, solar and wind); energy storage technologies (heat, batteries, fuel cells, flywheels and pumped storage); the electricity grid (transmission & distribution networks, smart grid and microgrids); energy efficiency; demand side management. The course will provide the student the basic energy terminology (including units, measurements, principles), and matrixes for evaluating the sustainability as well as the feasibility…