This chapter is about finding the law. Research skills are expected of Australian law graduates; indeed, you need these skills to practise law competently. As Chapter 1 highlighted, the law is so immense that we cannot possibly know it all and, besides that, it changes all the time! By the time you enter into legal practice, the law you learned at university may have changed or may no longer apply.

Three of the most significant problems affecting the world today are air pollution, global warming, and energy insecurity. This chapter discusses each of these problems, in turn. It starts by discussing the magnitude of the global air pollution health problem today, the sources of the pollution, and how transitioning to clean, renewable energy can solve this problem. It then discusses the difference between the greenhouse effect and global warming and quantifies the major contributors to each. It describes the strength of each warming component, including gases, particles, and direct heat emissions. It also describes how cooling chemicals in the atmosphere mask part of global warming. It then discusses the impacts of global warming. Finally, the chapter describes four types of energy insecurity problems the world faces with the current energy system and how transitioning to WWS can help to solve those problems.

One of the greatest concerns facing the implementation of a 100 percent clean, renewable energy and storage system for all purposes worldwide is whether electricity, heat, cold, and hydrogen will be available when needed. In other words, can a 100 percent system avoid blackouts, which occur when the electric power grid fails because not enough electricity is available to meet demand at a given moment? Similarly, will a 100 percent system always have enough heat, cold, and hydrogen at the times needed?

The solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security requires not only a technical and economic roadmap but also popular support and political will. In fact, the main limitations of a transition to 100 percent clean, renewable energy and storage are neither technical nor economic; instead, they are social and political. People need to believe that a solution is possible, to understand what changes they can make in their own lives to solve the problems, to make such changes, and to support policymakers who can pass laws speeding a transition. Policymakers, themselves, need to take bold steps in affecting a transition. Thus, one of the most important factors leading to a change is education about what is possible and why it is possible. This textbook aims to contribute toward that education.

So far, this book has examined several components of a 100 percent clean, renewable energy and storage system. This chapter focuses on integrating the components together in countries, states, cities, and towns to provide end-point roadmaps for a transition. Such roadmaps provide scenarios for meeting all-purpose, annually averaged power demand with 100 percent WWS in 2050. Chapter 8 discusses methods of matching time-dependent power demand with supply and storage. The subjects discussed in this chapter are projecting annually averaged power demand in all energy sectors to 2050 (Section 7.1), quantifying the transition of all business-as-usual (BAU) energy in all sectors to electricity, electrolytic hydrogen, and some heat, all sourced by WWS (Section 7.2), reducing end-use power demand due to such a transition (Section 7.3), performing a renewable energy resource analysis (Section 7.4), selecting a WWS energy mix in each location to meet end-use demand in the annual average while also meeting resource constraints (Section 7.5), calculating changes in energy costs due to such a transition (Section 7.6.1), calculating changes in air pollution mortality and morbidity and their associated costs due to such a transition (Section 7.6.2), and estimating the climate-relevant emissions and their associated costs due to such a transition (Section 7.6.3). The methods in this chapter are applicable to roadmaps for towns, cities, states, provinces, and countries but are derived here for countries as an example.

A 100 percent wind-water-solar (WWS) energy infrastructure involves electrifying or providing direct heat for all energy sectors and then providing the electricity or heat with WWS. Because electricity is such a large part of the solution, understanding how it works is important. In addition, WWS technologies convert either mechanical or solar energy into electricity. This chapter provides the basic information for understanding those conversion processes, which are elaborated on in Chapters 5 (solar energy) and 6 (wind energy). This chapter discusses the basics of electricity with a particular focus on electric power. It starts by examining different types of electricity – static electricity, lightning, and wired electricity. It then covers voltage and Kirchoff’s laws of voltage and current. Next, it turns to power, resistance in series and parallel, and capacitors. This is followed by a discussion of electromagnetism, AC electricity, and inductors. Both single-phase and three-phase AC electricity, as well as generators, are then described. Finally, real and reactive power, transformers, and transmission, including high voltage AC and DC transmission, are covered.

The solution to air pollution, global warming, and energy insecurity is, in theory, simple and straightforward: electrify or provide direct heat for everything; obtain the electricity and heat from only wind, water, and solar power; store energy; and reduce energy use.

After solar, onshore and offshore wind have the potential to supply the greatest portion of the world’s all-purpose energy demand. Not only are wind resources abundant in almost every country of the world, but the cost of onshore wind energy has also declined so much in recent years, that it is, in 2020, the least expensive form of new electric power in many countries of the world. The low cost has resulted in massive installations of wind to replace fossil-fuel power plants and to provide new energy demand.