end date on fossil fuels. We all know, or at least some of us know, and you might even after having completed this course, know of Marion King Hubbert, who would predicted peak oil. The big question is: when is peak oil, and when it happens what happens to our economy? That is of course a scary scenario, and that's why we're looking for something that's renewable. An energy source that keeps coming to us at all times or at least for a very, very long time. We also would like a clean technology. We know from the 70s and 60s how we polluted most of our environment, where we had industry and this we would also get rid of. We want to use energy and we want to do it responsibly so it's clean, and our surroundings are clean. We also want to emit less carbon dioxide when we do it. We all know that carbon dioxide is not good for our climate or at least it leaves to changes that we might not want. And therefore we would also ideally like to lower CO2 emission during our energy producing activities. And there are of course different types of renewable energy, things that qualify as renewable energy sources. There's wind energy, solar energy, tidal, wave energy, ocean energy, bio energy, et cetera, et cetera. So what kind of volume in terms of energy or how much energy can we get from those renewable sources? What can they deliver? And Nathan Lewis, he made a very nice plot awhile ago, where he looked at the energy we consume at the moment. This was back in 2007, where, where humans consumed about 15 terrawatts of energy, 24 hours a day, every day, every week. Today, it's much higher and we predict by the year 2050, it's going to be 30 terrawatts. So a near doubling from the 2007 level, By the 21st century end, we'll be at 50 TW. And if we look at the energy sources we have today, we know that fossil fuel, we already know this is not going to help us. We can look at the ones we know of, of those renewables like biomass, the hydroelectric, the geothermal, ocean or tidal energy, wind energy, and also solar energy. If we look at at those different renewable energy sources and look at what their potential is - - how much can they give us theoretically and especially how much of it can we extract. For instance wind energy, there's plenty of wind in the middle of the Pacific ocean but it's going to be much more challenging to extract the wind energy out there, than it is going to be close to the shore. So we can also talk about a technical practical value that these energy sources have. And if you look at biomass, we have maybe five to seven terawatts accessible. So that's about half the energy that we are consuming right now, that we can maybe get from biomass if we used it all. So it's not enough. Hydroelectric is a brilliant renewable energy source, but it's linked normally to places where you have large reserves of water at high altitude close to a steep drop in, in altitude. So you can extract it and in turbines et cetera, by liberating this water through a long hose going downhill. There's also geothermal energy. In principle, there's a lot of it. More than we need in principle at the moment. But it's also very, very tricky to extract, because you have to go deep down to extract it, but it's there. So the practical potential at the moment is relatively small and limited to areas where with volcanos or with geothermic activities that is readily accessible at the surface of the earth. Then there's tidal or ocean currents, which we can also use, but again they are linked geographically to specific places at the moment. And then perhaps the largest one at the moment is wind energy, it's also the most explored. The practical potential of wind energy is about the level of what we are consuming at the moment. But it's clear that even if we add all those up, it's not enough. Then there is of course the solar energy that is little explored in fact, but it's has a vast potential. The technical value for solar energy is 10,000 terawatts. And if we think about what reaches the surface of, of the Earth it's over 100,000 terawatts. The energy flux from the sun - what we call the insulation - so the amount of watts that reach us, is an astronomical number, of 174 * 10^15 watts. A lot of this energy, of course, strikes the atmosphere first, some of it is transmitted, some of it is already in the atmosphere remitted as light. And only some of it actually hits the surface of the Earth so we're talking extraction of solar energy in a solar cell or a solar heating system. We would look at what actually gets to the surface where we humans travel around, and that's about 89 Petawatts. So, how can we then envisage using solar energy? It comes in, of course, as photons, and this we can, convert into something else that is useful to us. And different schools exist on how to convert this solar energy into a form that we find more useful. One of them is solar fuels. The vision there was, of course, just to take sun light and convert it, with some chemistry, into a fuel that is similar to what we know today like, petrol or coal. What is being done today mostly, even though it's very far from being applicable - it has been demonstrated. That you can, for instance, take sun light, and you can split water into hydrogen and oxygen that you can then later burn. There are also examples of, of direct fixing of carbon dioxide using sunlight and sea water or hydrogen to convert it into either liquid or gaseous fuels - like methane, or formic acid, or formaldehyde, or methanol. So those are solar fuel. In essence they take sunlight and convert it into a fuel or a chemical, a chemical we can later burn or convert as we see fit. There's the solar electric or the solar cells where we convert the sunlight directly into electricity, and this we'll hear much more about in this course. Then there's also solar thermal energy - where we convert light into heat. And of the three, the solar fuel is the least efficient at the moment in terms of converting the solar energy into a chemical energy. Solar electric systems are a little more efficient. You can get in concentrated systems up to high efficiencies but practically accessible values are somewhere in the 10 to 20% range. Then there's solar thermal. This can be highly efficient, as efficient as 85% or more of the solar energies converted into heat. The solar thermal energy systems are efficient but the energy you get out is heat. And if you want to convert that to something else, like electricity in a turbine you lose a lot of energy, and lose efficiency so it's mostly suited for heat. This can be large industrial heating systems, process heat, or it can be a small heating system on your house. If you think about it, the three are very different, and the harvesting problem is a surface problem. All, until now I've discussed how much energy does strike the surface of the Earth. And it means that the method we choose to extract it, must also be a surface thing so it needs to be thin and it needs to cover a large area. There the solar fuel, will only work well if it's, smeared over a large surface, and the chemistry then has to take place on that surface. And that puts some requirements on what the system looks like. That might also account for why it has been less successful, at least in practical terms, until now. Whereas the solar cells are easy to disseminate over a large area and they are inherently thin in the outline. If we now focus on the solar electric, they are also called photovoltaics, they have actually been known for a long time, or at least the effect that, they rely on. It was described very early and Albert Einstein actually got the Nobel Prize in 1921 for a detail explanation of the Photo electric effect that Hertz observed in 1887. The Photovoltaics effect as we know it where, potentials develop when we shine light on an object. Was actually described first by a French physicist called Becquerel as early as 1839. But it's taking a long time for us to get there, and it certainly has taken a long time for us to get to a point where we can extract meaningful energy from photovoltaics. It's only in the past 30 years it has happened. Before we, dive deep into this course we need to look at the requirements. I said something about, large surfaces, and to cover those large surfaces to enable us to harvest energy. This puts requirement on the technology, in terms of, how, how expensive is it going to be? How much material are we going to use in it's making? How complicated is it to make something that can cover a large surface, in a short time? Therefore we need to think about only using abundant materials, only materials we have enough of on Earth. Low energy payback time, ideally want the technology to pay itself back after a very short while. We want a low carbon footprint. So when we make those solar cells or when we deploy them, and when we operate them, we don't want to emit carbon dioxide as I said, earlier. We also want to make them efficient. Or at least make the use of land mass efficient. So, if our cells are not so efficient, where we need maybe large surface areas to extract a certain amount of energy, we'd at least use land mass of little value to us. It could be in the middle of the ocean or in a desert, where we might not think so much about wasting a lot of land, harvesting energy. We also need low cost. Economy goes into it, and we want the manufacturer to be very, very fast. We have all those ingredients put together, there's a chance that we could actually both solve the world's energy problem, and also have success financially.