Innovation Design: Energy and Sustainability - for iPad/Mac/PC

Innovation Design: Energy and Sustainability

Customers who have opted for a green tariff talk about the reasons why they have decided to do so.

What makes customers choose a green tariff?

Reasons why green tariffs are taken up by the minority in the UK.

The uptake of green tariffs

How a suburb in Holland is offsetting its power consumption by generating solar power.

Living in a power station

Woking and its use of green technologies to power community buildings and local houses.

Power generation in Woking

Looking at the issues that influence the consumer to change to green technologies, and the current programmes that exist to support that.

Green technologies that are available to the consumer

A professor of technology policy talks about the route of innovation in the context of green technologies.

What drives innovation in sustainable technologies

The role that government plays in promoting new technologies and the influence that they have.

Government: actor in the diffusion game

When you switch on a light or turn the heating on in your home, do you think about where that power has come from? In most of the world, we’re still burning harmful fossil fuels to create energy. However, throughout Europe a growing number of householders have decided to put the environment first, by switching to a “green tariff” with energy suppliers who can guarantee renewable, fossil fuel-free energy. This album explores the various ways in which innovative technologies - such as wind-farms, heat exchangers, photovoltaic panels and combined heat and power plants - provide the opportunity to revolutionise energy markets and turn whole communities and districts green. One town in Holland is a good example of a “suburban energy island”, where the solar-panelled buildings act as energy providers back to the main grid when they generate extra to spare. Altogether the tracks in the album inspire a new way of looking at designing modern living using a mix of technologies to ensure a socially, economically and environmentally sustainable future. You can find out more about innovation in design by exploring the albums "Design and Sustainability" and "Sustainable Communities". This material is taken from The Open University course T307 Innovation: designing for a sustainable future.