If you would like to learn more about some of the topics introduced in this weeks material, please look at some of the following links.

Video 3.2

The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory has an online LCOE calculator with some documentation explaining the calculations. The calculation used in the lecture is based on this approach.

Some resources that gather the cost of renewables and their historical development include:

• IRENA, through https://www.irena.org/costs/, see for example https://www.irena.org/publications/2021/Jun/Renewable-Power-Costs-in-2020
• The 2020 IEA electricity generation cost report and associated interactive calculator
• https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

Video 3.3

You can use our interactive web application, Renewables.ninja, to explore the variability of solar and wind electricity generation anywhere in the world

Some additional literature:

• “The increasing impact of weather on electricity supply and demand” (Staffell and Pfenninger, 2018)
• “Impacts of Inter-annual Wind and Solar Variations on the European Power System” (Collins et al., 2018)

Video 3.4

• A study estimating the renewable resource across Europe and pairing it with electricity demand estimates to see if regions can be electricity self-sufficient (Tröndle et al., 2019)

Video 3.5

On the topic of carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the electricity sector:

• The IEA thinks CCS has an important role to play in electricity (also see the separate commentary, “Is carbon capture too expensive?”)
• Not all voices are positive: for example, “Bioenergy not a climate cure-all, panel warns“, in Science magazine (2019)

Some different views on the topic of nuclear energy:

• “Does the world need nuclear energy?” (21 minutes video): https://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_mark_z_jacobson_debate_does_the_world_need_nuclear_energy
• “We Need To Talk About Nuclear Power” (~20 minutes read): https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-need-talk-nuclear-power/