Your Questions About Renewable Energy

admin answers:

It is a political term to describe power sources that don’t emit much CO2 but which can’t actually provide the power our civilisation needs (so far no country has managed to get much more than 20% of their power from wind or solar and even then they had to rely on their neighbours’ hydro and nuclear as well as their own coal to prevent the grid from collapsing). Hydro is the main renewable energy source for electricity production right now but is opposed by most of the people who claim we need renewable energy (and unlike their opposition to nuclear power they actually have good reasons to oppose hydro).

They are used mainly to delay the switch to nuclear power (which despite being not renewable should be good for millions of years at higher than current energy use) that would allow us to actually solve the global warming problem and thus contribute to global warming by keeping the fossil fuel industry in business.

Basically the way it does that is that a bunch of windmills get built and start supplying power to the grid but because of natural variability in the wind they don’t provide that power all the time (20% of rated capacity is considered pretty good for wind) nor can we control when they provide their power so to use wind power you need a source of backup power that is reliable and usually that means fossil fuels (nuclear could be used but if you use nuclear for that then you may as well not bother with the windmills because the windmills would not reduce CO2 emissions or save money). Solar is less variable but PV cells cost a lot more and it still needs backup at night and partial backup on cloudy days. The need for backup means that the fossil fuel industry still gets to exist (and continue pumping CO2 into the atmosphere) if the way to address (if very badly) climate change is to use wind and solar.

Hydro and geothermal have the reliability to be used for baseload although they only work in some locations and hydro power probably won’t be used where it can be because of the massive environmental damage building a dam causes.

Wave and Tidal power when you calculate how much energy there is turn out to be way too diffuse to be useful. Biofuels show promise but not much because you need land to grow them on and that land could be better used growing food or even being turned back into forest.

admin answers:

Oregon tech is a masters degree. Humboldt is a bachelors. The humboldt state program is a more traditional “civil” engineering program, which is sort of parallel to environmental engineering. This is probably the safe bet, as these jobs are always in demand. The civil/environmental/water resource engineer does a variety of work and large and small projects. Treatment plants design, sewer line design, water line design, levee design, floodway studies, water quality studies (streams, lakes, rivers, industrial discharge water quality, etc…). Also, alot of report preparation, dealings with the EPA on almost all projects, public meetings explaining projects, drainage studies, storm drain design, environmental clean-ups… The list goes on…

As for the Oregon tech program, it seems more like a ‘green’ energy engineering program. I only briefly looked at the curriculum, bit it appears that they teach the fundamentals of todays renewable energy markets, and also emphasize research into those technologies. This type of engineering is more volatile and risky from a career standpoint, as those companies who engineer renewable energy are often start-ups, government subsidized, and so forth… With the price of copper so high now, the wind energy market is dying fast, since it is effectively impossible to cost effectively use wind power now… Same with solar, the rare earth minerals needed to produce the panels are in short supply, and getting more and more expensive, and on top of that, I belive the U.S. Has only one location where such minerals are mined, the rest are controlled by the Chinese overseas… Thats worth checking into, but I believe that to be the case currently. At any rate, perhaps the graduates from Oregon Tech will engineer new renewable energy sources that we haven’t heard of yet… That seems like the type of program that is… Highly research and innovation based. So a career in that line of work you have to understand the emerging technologies, strength of the markets, and the politics that usually go hand in hand with renewable energy technologies…

Both are ABET accredited engineering degrees, so you’ll be able to become professionally licensed once you complete your degree… That is a good thing, and you’ll want to avoid a program that isn’t accredited.

Good luck.