Electricity supplies

Overview

Click on the links above for teaching schemes, activities and web links and other resources related to this topic.

This unit includes many opportunities to cover aspects of decision making.

1 What is electricity?

• Borrow a model steam engine and electric motor from physics and demonstrate generation of electricity, discussing the stages and the efficiency. Simulations available on some physics CDs.
• Set of true or false questions to test knowledge and understanding of basic facts and terms such as circuit, electric shock, voltage, power ratings, kWh and joules, the efficiency of a gas fired power station.
• Discuss the statement "electricity is the single most useful human discovery ever made". This could be done by proposing alternatives for the accolade and comparing rival claims.

2 Generation of electricity UK

• There are good videos showing both renewable and non-renewable generation from OU. www.powerworks.com.au has an animated diagram of a coal fired power station.
• Each student or group to take one primary source, renewable or non-renewable, and write a marketing sheet to sell its benefits. See http://whyfiles.org/041solar/main1.html http://www.solarcentury.co.uk for an example. The student can choose the audience, such as domestic consumers, colleges or generating companies, to direct the marketing at.
• Nuclear power, videos from BNFL and information from an anti-nuclear power group, followed by a discussion of risks and benefits of nuclear power.
• Planning future electricity supplies, how is demand modelled?, compare demand predictions made 20 years ago and now. How do past predictions match the facts? What assumptions were included which are now shown to have been wrong.
• Students could make their own predictions of how the graph on page 130 will continue and list the main assumptions they made.
• An evaluation of the best way to reduce Britain's emissions of greenhouse gases. A set of fact sheets is needed with the potential capacity, advantages and disadvantages of each method of generating electricity or see http://www.undp.org/seed/eap/activities/wea/drafts-frame.html chapter 7 for more detailed information. Each group should choose the two generating methods they think would be most effective and discuss the measures needed to encourage implementation of their recommendations. UK scenarios in www.dti.gov.uk/energy/whitepaper. Click on annexes at bottom of index, just below different language versions and above related documents.
  

3 Generation of electricity - Low income countries

• SATIS 20 energising an Indian Village
• Evaluate the comparative benefits and costs of large dams or small local ways of generating electricity. http://www.dams.org/ http://www.undp.org/seed/eap/activities/wea/drafts-frame.html chapter 10
• Write a short story describing how the life of someone in a rural village in Africa might have changed when photovoltaic cells were made available. People would then have some electricity, where before there were only paraffin and gas lamps and battery operated electrical equipment. See New Scientist 7 October 1995 p40 for an article to support this.