Energy Generation And Storage

A bus shelter on a road outside a town has an electronic sign telling waiting passengers when the next bus is due. Nobody laid a cable to it. On its roof is a solar panel about the size of a laptop, and inside the upright is a sealed battery. The whole design of that sign, its brightness, its refresh rate, whether it sleeps at night and how big the shelter roof had to be, was settled by one decision taken before anything was drawn: where the power was coming from.

This lesson gives you the physics you need and, more importantly, the argument you need. You will learn how power is generated from coal, gas and oil, how nuclear power is generated, and how power is generated from wind, solar, tidal, hydro-electrical and biomass sources. For each group you will learn the arguments for and against their selection, which is what the specification actually asks for. Then you will meet energy storage systems, including kinetic and pumped storage systems and alkaline and re-chargeable batteries, and you will size a battery pack for a real product. This is core technical principles content, examined in Section A of Paper 1, and it supplied question 1 of the specimen paper.