Unit 2: Process flow

Today we looked at all the steps involved in making electricity. We started by cutting out the cards and trying to arrange them into a logical order. We discussed why each step is important and what issues may occur should something go wrong.

Then we matched the pictures to the correct cards and glued them all together to show how electricity is made.

As you can see a lot of steps are required so we can enjoy having electricity in our homes.

Unit 1: Hitting the target

In this session we analysed the number of units of energy our households are using every day:

Then, we were given the following scenario:

“It is the year 2017 and the EU has limited energy production in both renewable and non-renewable sources so that no more than 5000 tonnes of CO2 is produced per week in the UK.

This means that a household of 4 people has an allocated energy budget of 39kWh (= 39 units) per day.”

The average home in the UK uses 85 kWh per day. Our job was to look at the energy our homes are using to see where the savings are possible. We found this task really challenging!

Lastly, we looked at what the communities can do in order to reduce the amount of energy we are using:

Unit 1: When the lights go out

In our first session we started by looking at the electrical items we all use in a day. Jonjoe counted 23 different appliances he used since waking up on that day. This led us to a discussion about what would happen should all the lights go out and the high demand for electricity around the world:

Source: CCS project resources

After that, we discussed the following questions:

• Why not continue to use fossil fuels (the cheapest option) to produce most of our electricity?
• What initiatives for tackling carbon dioxide emissions are you aware of?

As true scientists, we noted down the findings of the discussion in our lab notebooks: 

Welcome!

Welcome to the Tomorrow's Engineers' Carbon Capture and Storage Project Website. This is the place where we will be updating you about the progress of our work.

The aim of this project is to explore how vital is energy to modern life. Because of the huge world population and massive amounts of carbon dioxide that come from the production of energy from fossil fuels and other industrial processes, we need to look at the ways of meeting the demand for energy and at the same time reducing the emissions. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is one of the ways of reducing carbon dioxide levels. Through this project we are going to learn more about this idea and at the same time share with you our learning journey through the posts on this blog.