Introduction to the Electricity Industry

In Development

Course Description

An introductary course on the basic structure of the electricity industry. Designed to be at the difficulty level of a lower division course for an undergraduate university student.

Prerequisites

None

Licensing

This lecture content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) . You can visit the Creative Commons website to learn more about the details of this license, but we also offer a summary of the terms of this license below.

“Attribution” means that if you reference any material in this lecture series, you must give credit to Pearl Street Studio. This can be done by adding text such as:

Course: “Introduction to the Electricity Industry”, Lecture: “Grid Components: Transmission Lines” by Alessia K. Levante, available at https://pearlstreetstudio.org/introduction-to-the-electricity-industry , is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

“NonCommercial” means that the use must not be primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation. If an individual, company, or organization would like to use this material for commercial purposes, such as workforce training, you can reach out to Pearl Street Studio on our contact page to request to enter into a commercial license for a fee. This fee will help to fund the further development of educational content at Pearl Street Studio.

“Share Alike” means that our content can be adapted, but any adaptations must be licensed under the same license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Generation & Storage

This unit introduces the different kinds natural resources and the technologies that are used for generating electricity as well as technologies used for storing energy.

Coal
This lecture introduces the energy resource coal and explains how it is used to generate electricity.

Crude Oil
This lecture introduces the energy resource crude oil and explains how it is used to generate electricity.

Natural Gas
This lecture introduces the energy resource natural gas and explains the different types of natural gas generators.

Geothermal
This lecture introduces what geothermal is and how the different technologies generate electricity.

Nuclear
This lecture introduces what nuclear power plants are and how they generate electricity.

Hydropower
This lecture introduces what hydropower damns are and how they generate electricity .

Wind
This lecture introduces what wind power is and how wind turbines (not windmills!) generate electricity.

Solar
This lecture introduces what solar power is and how the different kinds of solar panels generate electricity or heat.

Batteries
This lecture introduces what batteries are and how they store energy.

Resource Comparison
This lecture compares the energy generation and storage resources discussed throughout this unit.