Humanity is facing a major challenge. It's the climate challenge. In 2015, the Paris Agreement saw 195 countries transparently commit to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to keep global warming below 2°C. This is a colossal challenge. This limit will at best be barely touched or, on the contrary, exceeded in about 30 years. That's an extremely short time. Given that the energy sector accounts for two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions, mitigating climate change largely requires radically overhauling energy production and consumption processes. Indeed, keeping global warming below 2°C requires a considerable challenge, since the proportion of low-carbon technologies in electricity production must reach nearly 90%.
The course aims to provide the basics for understanding climate physics, the role of the energy sector in climate change, and what climate mitigation entails. It aims to put into perspective the role of variable renewable energies (solar, wind, hydro) in the energy transition, but also the challenges of their integration into the electricity grid. The course addresses the challenges posed by the variability of renewable energies for their deployment and discusses the levers of action to facilitate their integration into the grid, namely the mapped assessment of the renewable energy production potential upstream of power plant installation projects and weather forecasting applied to the energy sector in the operational phase of renewable energy production plants. Finally, the course opens up to the broader issues of integrating renewable energies into the grid.
