Carrying on from where we left off in the last post we’ll briefly round up the last few days of our intense teaching week for Context and Challenges in Energy and Society (one of our core modules on the Energy and Society course).
Southampton’s geothermal resources have been tapped for use in a large CHP scheme operating locally since 1986
So! Wednesday saw a focus on Future Technologies with Andy Aplin opening the batting with a fascinating and refreshing impartial overview of the potential of Fracking in the UK. Next up in session 2 Charlotte Adams gave a talk on “Developing the UK’s Low Enthalpy Geothermal Resources” and painting the lesser known picture of heat from geothermal in the UK and the potential for this technology to be expanded to serve domestic and industrial energy needs in the future.
After lunch Douglas Halliday gave a talk on ‘Solar Futures‘; updating us on the cutting edge of solar research before Adwoa Asantewaa rounded up the day with a presentation on Electricity in sub-Saharan Africa.
The theme for Thursday was ‘Policies, politics and violence’ (with a touch of wind power at the end!). The day was kicked off with a presentation on the Energy Policy of the EU by Christian Schweiger, next up was The violence of energy politics (including a critique of the Resource Curse) by John McNeish who has joined us for the week visiting from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Third was “Extractive” development in post-conflict Peru, or politics by other means at the extractive frontier’ by Juan-Pablo Sarmiento-Barletti before finishing the day with a presentation by Chris Crabtree on Wind Power.
Moving to Friday Ahmed Bokash gave us a presentation first on ‘Understanding the Grid’ to bring those of us with a little less technical experience right up to speed, before John Bothwell gave an enlightening talk on ‘Bio-Energy’; giving a great overview on bio-energy and biofuels from 1st to 4th generation. With John’s talk and the subsequent seminar session sadly our intense teaching week came to a close; we’ve had a fantastic week and would like to thank all of the speakers we’ve been lucky to hear from over the last 5 days for coming to speak to us.
MSc Energy and Society 