Renewable energy

Renewable energy is generally defined as energy that is collected from resources which are naturally replenished on a human timescale, such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves, and geothermal heat. Renewable energy often provides energy in four important areas: electricity generation, air and water heating/cooling, transportation, and rural (off-grid) energy services.

Based on REN21's 2014 report, renewables contributed 19 percent to humans' global energy consumption and 22 percent to their generation of electricity in 2012 and 2013, respectively. This energy consumption is divided as 9% coming from traditional biomass, 4.2% as heat energy (non-biomass), 3.8% hydro electricity and 2% is electricity from wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass. Worldwide investments in renewable technologies amounted to more than US$214 billion in 2013, with countries like China and the United States heavily investing in wind, hydro, solar and biofuels.

Generation

Generation is the act of producing offspring. In kinship terminology, it is a structural term designating the parent-child relationship. It is also known as biogenesis, reproduction, or procreation in the biological sciences. The term is also often used synonymously with cohort in social science; under this formulation the term means "people within a delineated population who experience the same significant events within a given period of time". Generation in this sense of birth cohort, also known as a "social generation", is widely used in popular culture, and has been the basis for societal analysis. Serious analysis of generations began in the nineteenth century, emerging from an increasing awareness of the possibility of permanent social change and the idea of youthful rebellion against the established social order. Some analysts believe that a generation is one of the fundamental social categories in a society, while others view its importance as being overshadowed by other factors such as class, gender, race, education, and so on.

Energy

In physics, energy is a property of objects which can be transferred to other objects or converted into different forms, but cannot be created or destroyed. The "ability of a system to perform work" is a common description, but it is difficult to give one single comprehensive definition of energy because of its many forms. For instance, in SI units, energy is measured in joules, and one joule is defined "mechanically", being the energy transferred to an object by the mechanical work of moving it a distance of 1 metre against a force of 1 newton. However, there are many other definitions of energy, depending on the context, such as thermal energy, radiant energy, electromagnetic, nuclear, etc., where definitions are derived that are the most convenient.

Common energy forms include the kinetic energy of a moving object, the potential energy stored by an object's position in a force field (gravitational, electric or magnetic), the elastic energy stored by stretching solid objects, the chemical energy released when a fuel burns, the radiant energy carried by light, and the thermal energy due to an object's temperature. All of the many forms of energy are convertible to other kinds of energy, and obey the law of conservation of energy which says that energy can be neither created nor be destroyed; however, it can change from one form to another.

Santee Cooper

Santee Cooper, also known officially from the 1930s as the South Carolina Public Service Authority, is South Carolina's state-owned electric and water utility that came into being during the New Deal as both a rural electrification and public works project that created two lakes and cleared large tracts of land while building hydro-electric dams and power plants. Its headquarters are located in Moncks Corner, South Carolina.

As one of the largest power providers in South Carolina, Santee Cooper directly serves more than 165,000 residential and commercial customers in Berkeley, Georgetown, and Horry counties. With a diverse fuel and energy supply of coal, nuclear, oil, gas, hydro and some renewable energy, Santee Cooper supplies power to the cities of Bamberg and Georgetown, 30 large industrial customers, and Charleston Air Force Base. Santee Cooper generates the power distributed by South Carolina's 20 electric cooperatives.

The people of South Carolina govern Santee Cooper through a board of directors appointed by the governor and approved by the state Senate. A board member represents each congressional district and each of the three counties where Santee Cooper serves retail customers directly; one board member has previous electric cooperative experience; and the chairman is appointed at-large.

Steven Chu

Steven Chu (Chinese: 朱棣文; pinyin: Zhū Dìwén, born February 28, 1948) is an American physicist who is known for his research at Bell Labs and Stanford University in cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, along with his scientific colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.

Chu served as the 12th United States Secretary of Energy from 2009 to 2013. At the time of his appointment as Energy Secretary, Chu was a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where his research was concerned primarily with the study of biological systems at the single molecule level. On February 1, 2013, he announced he would not serve for the President's second term and resigned on April 22, 2013.

Chu is a vocal advocate for more research into renewable energy and nuclear power, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combating climate change. For example, he has conceived of a global "glucose economy", a form of a low-carbon economy, in which glucose from tropical plants is shipped around like oil is today.