Didcot power station. | Image by Andrew Smith
Energy is vital to our modern world. Some fridges can consume the same amount of energy as 25 large power plants produce every year. That’s a lot of energy just for keeping your food cool. And Google uses around 0.013% of the world’s energy – enough to continuously power 200,000 homes (remember that when you’re next googling your homework!). Where does all this energy come from, and how can we use it better?
Engineering is at the heart of answering these questions. Whether it is designing sustainable energy systems, extracting fossil fuels in more environmentally sound ways, creating innovative projects to reduce carbon emissions, or better understanding the nature of energy itself you can bet that somewhere there is an engineer working away to make it happen.
In this zone we have five engineers who are all working closely with energy. There is an engineer making sure we all have electricity in the future, an engineer who helps keep the lights in your house on all year long, and another who fixes power stations around the country. There is one engineer looking into ways to charge your phone in just a few seconds, and another who investigates the electrical equipment of a fusion reactor.