We need to move away from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity. Electricity generation accounts for about 30% of US CO₂ emissions so cleaning up this sector is a key part of the energy transition. But it’s a huge undertaking. You can think of the electrical system in the US, or in whatever country you live, as a single sprawling machine that reaches from every power plant to every connected home and workplace. Changing it, even in small ways, let alone fundamentally transforming it, is complex, time-consuming and expensive.

One person who understands the electricity sector is Jesse Jenkins. He’s an associate professor at Princeton University with appointments in both the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment. He’s also co-host of the excellent Shift Key podcast along with Robinson Meyer of Heatmap News.

Prof. Jenkins teaches a course at Princeton called Introduction to the Electricity Sector: Engineering, Economics and Regulation.

He’s made the slide decks from all the course lectures freely available to anyone at this Dropbox folder.

I haven’t read through all these lectures yet, but from what I’ve seen so far, there’s a wealth of information here about the science of how electricity and electricity generation works, about how electricity is transmitted and distributed over the grid, and about how electricity is priced and regulated.

If you want to learn more about the electricity sector, I think this is a great resource.

Of course, it would be great if we also had recordings of Jenkins’s lectures. There are a few older recordings on YouTube, but if you want the latest I guess you’ll just have to enroll at Princeton for that!

Thanks for reading.