The Energy Transition: A Roadmap to a Cleaner & Smarter Energy System

The course offers a holistic, integrated systems view on the energy system taking into account planetary boundaries. We discuss different (renewable) energy technologies and their integration into systems. This explicitly also includes links with the mobility and built environment sectors as well as the role of flexibility and storage. Our analyses include technical, economic and socio-political considerations. Besides the technological system change, the course also shows the need for behavioural, social, and economic system change toward a whole new energy system. Finally, we discuss attractive transition pathways towards clean energy systems.

It does so by breaking down the system change into 8 modules:

1. Introducing the need for an energy (world system) transition
2. Energy technologies: Fossil Fuels, Biofuels and Nuclear
3. Energy technologies: Solar and wind
4. Viability of an energy system based on Solar and Wind
5. Current state and outlook on Solar and Wind Technology
6. System integration: renewable energy and sustainable mobility
7. System integration: Flexibility and storage
8. Changing the system

After this course, students are able to:

1. understand the different reasons for moving away from fossil fuels and how they appeal to different people with different belief systems.
2. understand how much energy different areas of the world need, now and in the future, with special attention to primary vs final vs useful energy.
3. evaluate the advantages, disadvantages, developments and limitations of the major sources of energy that could replace fossil fuel, with a focus on resource availability, land use and more generally the impact on the other planetary boundaries.
4. apply learning rate and exponential growth to predict the development and adoption of new energy technologies and that accelerating the transition could lower the total costs over time.
5. evaluate the challenges that come from intermittency of solar and wind energy, energy transport and the role that storage could have over different time scales. E.g. day, year, decade, and century.
6. analyze how system changes in multiple areas could transform the electricity grid from a primarily centralized top-down system to a primarily decentralized bottom-up system.
7. analyze how economic and governance factors affect the system change necessary for the energy transition.

You must meet the following requirements

• Registered for a degree programme other than
• HBO-TOP Applied Physics, Pre-Master

• A video lecture series composed of modules with main topics within the energy transition