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Program overview

The power sector is at a critical juncture. We urgently need to reduce the fossil fuel intensity of our power generation mix and, in many countries, power sector reform can bring other benefits, such as improvements in health and economic growth. In this program, leading academics from Imperial College London, alongside NREL and experts from industry, will explain why and how to clean up the power sector in your country, illustrated with current, real-life case studies and practical advice. Key global figures from the public and private sector add their own personal and professional perspectives to this course.

The Clean Power Program includes best-practice power sector reform policies from the perspectives of legislators, policymakers, the energy sector, investors and civil society. The first course will explain the way that clean power fits into a wider set of political priorities, such as health, technology, energy security, economic growth and the environment, in any country or region. In the second course, the policy landscape for the power sector is described in detail, demonstrating how policies can help stimulate the growth of clean power. The third course outlines the challenges and solutions to integrating different types of power sources into one stable, reliable system.

This program will equip you with the knowledge and tools to create a pro-renewables and investor-ready policy environment in your own region. In a world committed to meeting the climate change goals in the Paris Agreement, you will be well-informed to apply solutions in your own context.Established ten years ago as an Institute of Imperial College London, the Grantham Institute is a world-leading authority on climate change and environmental issues. The Grantham Institute will bring industry and public sector experts from around the world to share their practical and recent experience.

What you will learn

  • How to balance different political priorities to deliver clean power policies
  • What benefits clean power implementation can bring to different countries around the world and, specifically, what they bring in your context
  • What makes a successful, renewables-friendly policy environment
  • How to attract finance for your clean power projects
  • How to deliver secure and affordable clean power
  • How to integrate a high volume of variable renewables into a grid successfully

Program Class List

Meet Your Instructors

Jo Haigh

Professor at Imperial College London
Professor Joanna Haigh has been Co-Director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College since 2014. For the previous five years she was Head of the Department of Physics. Jo's scientific interests include radiative transfer in the atmosphere, climate modelling, radiative forcing of climate change and the influence of solar irradiance variability on climate. She has published widely on these topics in the scientific literature and contributed to numerous items to the written and broadcast popular media. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Institute of Physics and an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College Oxford. She has been President of the Royal Meteorological Society, Editor of Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society and of the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, a Lead Author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and acted on many UK and international panels.

Kris Murray

Dr at Imperial College London
Kris is an ecologist with interests in global change, conservation and health, working on problems where these key themes are interconnected, including: human health - climate, environmental and social change impacts on infectious disease burdens and distributions, disease emergence, zoonoses, biosecurity risks, health economics; and climate change - influence on ecosystems, biodiversity and health risks In particular, Kris focuses on problems that characterise the impacts of global change, that could also be leveraged for mitigating human impacts and promoting better stewardship of the natural world.

Shane Tomlinson

Mr at Imperial College London
Shane Tomlinson, a Director of E3G, leads work on political economy mapping and overseeing the UK programme. He previously served as the Director of Development at E3G working across the organisation on strategy development, fundraising and the creation of systems for change. Prior to joining E3G Shane was a Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House where he published research on the future of the EU Energy Union, Brexit, stranded assets and the future of the international climate regime. He has also worked as a Policy Adviser in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit working on energy policy, sustainable consumption and production issues and the design and launch of the Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Shane holds an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, an MSc in Economic History from the London School of Economics and a BSc in Economics and Economic History from the University of Bristol.

Richard Green

Professor at Imperial College London
Richard Green has been studying the economics and regulation of the electricity industry for nearly 30 years. The main focus of his recent work has been on the impact of low-carbon generation (nuclear and renewables) and energy storage on the electricity market, and the business and policy implications of this. He has written extensively on market power in wholesale electricity markets and has also worked on transmission pricing. He has been a professor at Imperial College Business School since 2011. He was previously Professor of Energy Economics and Director of the Institute for Energy Research and Policy at the University of Birmingham, and Professor of Economics at the University of Hull. He started his career at the Department of Applied Economics and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He has spent time on secondment to the Office of Electricity Regulation and has held visiting appointments at the World Bank, the University of California Energy Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Clementine Chambon

Dr at Imperial College London
Clementine Chambon is a researcher in renewable energy technologies for rural electrification. Her interests lie in optimising design and delivery models for decentralised energy systems to reach the most energy-deprived communities in the world. Her current project examines biomass gasification and its application for rural electrification in LED countries. This spans topics such as electricity demand estimation, technological performance of biogasifiers, integration with other generation technologies as part of a hybrid system, and analysing their impact in terms of cost and CO2 mitigation potential. The research findings are directly commercialised through Oorja Development Solutions, a mission-driven company active in deploying solar mini-grids and community solar irrigation systems to provide clean energy access to off- and weak-grid communities in rural India.

Jeff Hardy

Dr at Imperial College London
Dr Jeffrey Hardy is a Senior Research Fellow at the Grantham Institute - Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, where he researches energy market transformation, innovative business models. He is also a Non-Executive Director of Public Power Solutions, a wholly-owned company of Swindon Borough Council specialising in renewable power and waste solutions. Previously he was Head of Sustainable Energy Futures at the GB energy regulator, Ofgem and Head of Science for Work Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He’s also worked at the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the UK Energy Research Centre, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Green Chemistry Group at the University of York and at Sellafield as research chemist in a nuclear laboratory.

Ajay Gambhir

Dr at Imperial College London
Ajay Gambhir is a Senior Research Fellow at the Imperial College London Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. His research addresses how society can transition to a low-carbon economy, considering the technologies and measures required to do so. He uses energy systems models at sub-national, national, regional and global scales to map out potential low-carbon transition pathways, with a particular focus on the processes that drive down low-carbon technology costs, thereby making their deployment more cost-effective. Ajay has been at Imperial College since 2010, during which time he has been the scientific lead on a number of low-carbon pathways studies for the UK government as part of its AVOIDing dangerous climate change programme. He has also led and participated in ESRC and EPSRC studies on manufacturing innovation for the production of low-cost solar PV modules, energy storage innovation, and rural electrification using solar PV and batteries. Currently he is focusing on the political economy of low-carbon pathways and how to design policies to support an equitable transition. Before joining Imperial College, Ajay was the Team Leader for EU and International Climate Change Economics at the UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change. He has also worked in the UK’s Office for Climate Change, as part of the civil service team that prepared the initial draft of the Climate Change Act 2008, the world’s first climate legislation. He has also worked in the UK Committee on Climate Change, which he helped design and set up as part of his work on the Climate Change Act.

Program overview

Want to learn about circuits and electronics? Wondering how the electronics behind sensors and actuators works, or how to make computers run faster, or your mobile phone battery last longer? This series of circuits and electronics courses taught by edX CEO and MIT Professor Anant Agarwal and colleagues is for you.

These online Circuits & Electronics courses are taken by all MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) majors.

Topics covered include: circuit abstraction, circuit elements such as resistors and sources, signals, and networks; circuit design and circuit analysis methods; digital abstraction, digital logic, and basic digital design; electronic devices including MOSFETs, digital switches, amplifiers; Energy storage elements like capacitors and inductors; dynamics of first-order and second-order networks and circuit speed; design in the time and frequency domains; op-amps, filters, and analog and digital circuits, signal processing, and applications. Design and lab exercises are also significant components of the XSeries program.

Weekly coursework includes interactive video sequences, readings from the textbook, homework, fun online laboratories, and optional tutorials. Each course will also have a final exam.

These are self-paced courses, so there are no weekly deadlines.

What you will learn

  • How to design and analyze circuits using both intuition and mathematical analysis
  • How to construct simple digital circuits and improve their speed
  • How to construct and analyze filters and their frequency response using capacitors and inductors
  • Design circuits applications using MOS transistors and operational amplifiers
  • How to measure circuit variables using tools such as virtual oscilloscopes, virtual multimeters, virtual frequency analyzers, and virtual signal generators
  • Compare the measurements of the circuit variables with the behavior predicted by mathematical models and explain the discrepancies

Program Class List

1
Circuits and Electronics 1: Basic Circuit Analysis

Course Details
Learn techniques that are foundational to the design of microchips used in smartphones, self-driving cars, computers, and the Internet.

Course Duration

5 Weeks

Time Commitment

5–7 hours per week

Price

$169.00

2
Circuits and Electronics 2: Amplification, Speed, and Delay

Course Details
Learn how to speed up digital circuits and build amplifiers in the design of microchips used in smartphones, self-driving cars, computers, and the Internet.

Course Duration

5 Weeks

Time Commitment

7–9 hours per week

Price

$169

3
Circuits and Electronics 3: Applications

Course Details
Learn about cool applications, op-amps and filters in the design of microchips used in smartphones, self-driving cars, computers, and the internet.

Course Duration

7 Weeks

Time Commitment

8–10 hours per week

Price

$169

Meet Your Instructors

Anant Agarwal

CEO and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT at edX
CEO of edX and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. His research focus is in parallel computer architectures and cloud software systems, and he is a founder of several successful startups, including Tilera, a company that produces scalable multicore processors. Prof. Anant won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture, and MIT's Smullin and Jamieson prizes for teaching. He is also the 2016 recipient of the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize for Higher Education, which recognized his work in advancing the MOOC movement. Additionally, he is a recipient of the Padma Shri award from the President of India and was named the Yidan Prize for Education Development Laureate in 2018. He holds a Guinness World Record for the largest microphone array, and is an author of the textbook "Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits."

Gerald Sussman

Professor, Electrical Engineering at MIT
Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT. He is a well known educator in the computer science community, perhaps best known as the author of "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs," which is universally acknowledged as one of the top ten textbooks in computer science, and as the creator of Scheme, a popular teaching language. His research spans a range of topics, from artificial intelligence, to physics and chaotic systems, to supercomputer design.
Piotr Mitros - Pearson Advance

Piotr Mitros

Former Chief Scientist at edX
Chief Scientist of edX and Research Scientist at MIT. His research focus is in finding ways to apply techniques from control systems to optimizing the learning process. He has worked as an analog designer at Texas Instruments, Talking Lights, and most recently, designed the analog front end for a novel medical imaging modality for Rhythmia Medical.
Chris Terman - Pearson Advance

Chris Terman

Senior Lecturer, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT
A Senior Lecturer in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Chris has been an award-winning lecturer for this course on campus since 1995. He has four decades of experience as a teacher, digital systems designer and courseware developer. Chris’ recent research is focused on educational technologies for teaching design skills.

Bonnie Lam

Graduate student, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT
Graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Her research interests are digital design methodologies for low-power applications, and she is currently studying low-power techniques for ultrasound imaging. She received her Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.) degree in Engineering Physics (Electrical Engineering Option) at the University of British Columbia in 2008 and her Masters of Science (S.M.) degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010.

“Brilliant course! It’s definitely the best introduction to electronics in Universe! Interesting material, clean explanations, well prepared quizzes, challenging homeworks and fun labs.”

Ilya

“6.002x will be a classic in the field of online learning. It combines Prof. Agarwal’s enthusiasm for electronics and education. The online circuit design program works very well. The material is difficult. I took the knowledge from the class and built an electronic cat feeder.”

Stan

“Brilliant course! It’s definitely the best introduction to electronics in Universe! Interesting material, clean explanations, well prepared quizzes, challenging homeworks and fun labs.”

Ilya

“6.002x will be a classic in the field of online learning. It combines Prof. Agarwal’s enthusiasm for electronics and education. The online circuit design program works very well. The material is difficult. I took the knowledge from the class and built an electronic cat feeder.”

Stan