Welcome to Renewable Energy Futures. It's a time of tremendous, very rapid change in energy systems worldwide, particularly in electricity. Much of this change, this transformation is being led by new types of renewable energy. After years of limping along, playing a pretty trivial role in energy systems, new forms of renewable energy notably wind and solar panel tech are playing a major role in energy systems, and in some case are even displacing traditional fossil fuels, particularly coal. In addition, all these new renewables are related to or connected to other changes in systems, such as the rapid rise in electric vehicles. All this transformation creates opportunities, it creates threats, it creates challenges. Where is energy going? What will energy systems look like in the future? No one knows for sure, but there's no shortage of speculation, information, analysis, reports. This course will help you sort through that. Through this course, we'll help you understand why all this change is happening, what are the most promising and perhaps less promising emerging technologies, approaches, strategies for energy futures, and start to pinpoint where the opportunities lie and where energy is going. We'll help you become essentially an informed consumer in the marketplace of confusing, at times competing claims, arguments, assertions. For example, there's much discussion about the hydrogen economy. What does that mean? What might that look like? What are some of the challenges there, technical and other? What is the connection between electric vehicles and renewable energy? Do they help or are they conflicting? Well, the answer is it depends, and relates to a concept called smart charging, which we'll talk about in detail in the class. You may have heard of community solar, what is that? What's driving it? But we'll talk about that. These are just a few examples of the types of topics we'll cover in this course, they'll help you sort through the many confusing possible energy futures. How is the course organized? We have four major topics or areas that we cover in the course. We'll start with looking at energy scenarios or forecasts. Where is energy going? What are the possibilities? We'll review the major studies that are out there, we'll talk in depth about this concept of essentially of business as usual where are we going versus climate stabilization, where will we need to go to stabilize the climate and minimize the negative impacts of climate change. I need to jump to the conclusion there, the path we're on now is not sufficient to achieve climate stabilization, but there are ways we can do it with renewable energy and other tools, we'll talk about that. We'll then talk in detail about the technologies themselves, renewable energy technologies. We'll talk about some that appear to be on a very successful path, those which are too early to say, because there are still technical issues to resolve, and those for which the story is a bit more complex; they got off to a rapid start and now appear to be slowing down. We'll talk more about why that's happening, what can be learned from that experience. We'll then move on to what are called the enabling technologies. Technologies that are not renewable in and of themselves, but have important implications for renewable energy, particularly electric vehicles, hydrogen and storage which are focused on batteries. Finally, we'll turn to emerging issues. The rapid rise of renewables is changing energy systems in a fundamental way and really present some fundamental threats, challenges, opportunities. We'll talk about electrification, distributed generation, energy access, utility death spiral and other issues that are emerging as significant drivers or significant opportunities for energy futures. In the next video, we'll jump right in about what drives energy changes, what has driven them in the past, and where energy seems to be going based on major studies that are out there.