LiU Summer Academy: Alternative Energy: past, present, future, and innovations

Under the influence of scientific and technological progress, our life is changing at a rapid pace. Understanding the basic principles that affect ongoing changes and future developments is important for all branches and areas. This course illustrates the general issues of one of the key industries for all technological progress - the energetic sector. Our focus will mainly be on alternative energy collected from renewable resources which are naturally replenished on a human timescale, including carbon neutral sources like sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves, and geothermal heat. We will consider the advances that significantly improve energy efficiency of different devices and systems. Discussions will be conducted with taking into account social, economic and medical aspects. As the course is at a popular scientific level, it will be interesting and useful not only for students of technical disciplines but also for students of humanities.

The course is organised in lectures, seminars, case studies, readings and student presentations. The flexibility of approaches in the study and the rating provides different alternatives to increase and prove your knowledge in a wide variety of optional activities, such as computer simulation, physical calculations, economic analysis, historical review, etc.