All right welcome to renewable power. it's an exciting and chaotic time in the renewable power industry. The electricity industry worldwide is changing dramatically. Renewables are entering the market at an astounding pace. It's exciting and chaotic time and in this course, will explain how this is all working. To understand what this course is about it's good to step back a little bit and talk about what electricity systems used to be. For the 20th century the electricity industry worldwide was pretty stable. We'll call, it wasn't a lot of change. Most power, most electricity was provided by large, centralized power plants shown here, a large coal burning power plant. Those plants were large and in most cases, fossil fired coal is a popular fuel. There are quite a few nuclear plants as well. The structure of the industry was, was pretty consistent. There was a, an entity it could've been a government energy an entity. It could have been a private company in many countries around. It was a regulated monopoly that is a private company that was controlled by the government, but in some countries it was a government function itself. And there was typically, that entity would generate, transmit and distribute electricity and solitary tailors. The mascot of utility industry in the US was ready kilowatt and it was a kind of stable, predictable industry involvement of users in anything related to electricity was pretty minimal. For example, the only interaction most people would have with their heating system was an old school analog thermostat. Again, a stable, reliable system, a lot of incentives in place to not adopt new technologies. So it was, it was an industry that was slow to adopt new technologies in some ways, not, there wasn't a lot of change going on. But now, all of a sudden things are looking quite different. For example, shown here is for solar photovoltaics, renewable energy, renewable electricity production technology has grown dramatically astoundingly quickly over the last 10 years, where it now is over 600 gigawatts worldwide, which is a huge amount of electricity. And if we look at wind power, which will shortly, it shows a similar graph of astounding growth in new renewable technologies. Another way to look at this is in terms of new power plants built every year. So if you take a global perspective, look at all power plants built. Most recent good data we have is for 2019 of all those power plants including coal and natural gas and nuclear and oil and renewable. Of all those power plants, 75 percent of them are fueled by renewables and most of that is wind and solar PV. So again, it's an astounding statistic. Three quarters of all new power plants being built now are fueled by renewable fuels and that is a dramatic change. That number was 40% in 2019. I'm sorry, in 2009 And now again it's up at about or just over 75%. In other words, most of the power plants being built now worldwide use are powered by wind and solar PV. Another change in the industry. And this is a case study looking at the US. Where as you can see that this graph shows the fuels providing electricity and a very dramatic yeah pattern here showing where coal was the dominant fuel, the most significant fuel going back to 1950 and grew at a pace that at a at a pace that was faster than for any other fuels. But all of a sudden about 2007, it took a total turn where now it is dropping dramatically. It has been passed by natural gas. And if you look at current data by month, it's about roughly in the scale of where renewables about to be passed by renewables. So in the US coal has changed dramatically and is almost fading very quickly as an electricity fuel. Not our countries show this pattern, but for example, the UK shows something very similar where coal is disappearing and natural gas, renewables are making up. Now this story varies significantly by country. For example, several Asian countries are still pursuing coal and also pursuing renewables. So the story does vary, but they're clearly rapid changes going on another way to think about renewables, the role of renewables. As you look at global electricity reduction, all the electricity produced worldwide, about just over a quarter of it comes from renewables. Now, much of that 16 of 16 relative to the total is hydro, but wind and solar PV make up call 9% just under. It's over that by now and nine may not sound huge, but few things are worth noting this is Global electricity production. So nine of global is a huge number And that nine Is mostly new. If you go back to 2000, that would be well under 1%. So really rapid changes going on as wind and solar PV penetrate the global electricity market. So what do electricity system look like going forward? Well, we don't know, but we can get a sense of the things that are currently changing now and shown here are some examples of things that are new in electricity systems. We have new policy tools such as auctions, we have new concepts such as flexibility, which we'll talk about the course, which helps integrate variable renewables into the grid. We have new markets, new ways of trading electricity related goods and services, for example, that's something we'll talk about called Ancillary services, which renewables are affecting. And new markets are developing. We're seeing wind and solar PV popping up all over worldwide and astounding numbers new institutions in electricity, for example, the is so independent system operator new jobs as more and more wind solar PV Come on. More and more people are working renewables, jobs are well over the 10 million $10 million people mark are continuing to go quickly and new challenges. The electricity system in most places worldwide was not designed around renewables and it's having to adopt and adapt quite quickly. There's a graphic we'll talk about later in the course in California called the duck curve, where the growing role for solar PV has changed electricity system, required it to run differently than it used to. So we'll talk about those new challenges. You step back a bit and think about changes, what's going on in electricity is not unprecedented or can be seen as analogous to what's going on in other fields. For example, think about the telephone industry back to 1960 1970. It was very simple you picked up the phone, you dialed it and that was it. Not a lot of new technologies, not a lot of change, not a lot of new services or products, but a reliable, predictable service. Well, now the phone is an entirely different concept and does very different things. Similar think about video back in, we'll call in 1960 there was a thing called the TV a television, typically, for example, in the US, it had 13 channels and three networks and that was kind of it. Well now video is something totally different. There's Youtube and amazon pride and netflix. It's a very different world for video video. It's changed dramatically. Telephone has changed dramatically. Electricity is as well if you think back to the old electricity industry, large centralized fossil fuel power plants, regulated monopolies, not a lot of technological innovation. Now electricity is looking very different. Might be rooftop PV system, It might be a smart thermostat that integrates in the system and allows the solar PV to be accounted for in system operations. It might be an electric vehicle plugged into the garage which is controlled by the grid and electricity is delivered to or pulled from as needed for the system operation, lots of things, lots of new ideas, lots of new concepts. Electricity is changing at a very fundamental level as telephone did as video did now in this course is about renewable power. And just to sort out what this course covers and what it doesn't. One can think about renewable energy overall is coming in three types. There's loads related to electricity. There are liquid fuels such as ethanol, biodiesel, used for transportation. And there are renewable energy technologies used to produce heat such as a solar water heater on the roof or ground source heat pump. But this course is on electricity. This is a renewable power course on electricity systems. And there are two types. One can think of electricity producing renewables coming in. Two types so called utility scale are big and distributed, both of which we'll talk about in the course. So we'll take a quick break here and come back to talk about how the course itself is structured.
