The renewable energy landscape — solar, wind, storage, EV charging, and microgrids — how this field differs from traditional power engineering, the project lifecycle from design through commissioning, and a roadmap of this 21-item program.
Renewable energy engineering sits at the intersection of five interconnected technology families — solar PV, wind, battery storage, EV charging, and microgrids — and this module builds the mental model the rest of the program assumes: what distributed energy resources are, why interconnecting them at the grid edge is a fundamentally different problem than traditional centralized power engineering, and the project lifecycle every distributed renewable project moves through, from site assessment and design through permitting, interconnection, construction, and commissioning.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a grid-forming inverter matters for a microgrid in a way a grid-following inverter cannot, and why permitting and utility interconnection typically run in parallel rather than in sequence — two ideas Module 6's microgrid content and Module 7's interconnection content each return to from their own side of the problem.