Energy resources: power a town sim
Drag the faders on a model town's control desk to switch on coal, gas, nuclear, biofuel, geothermal, hydroelectric, wind, solar and tidal power, change the wind, the sky and the hour, and see hour by hour whether the supply meets the town's demand, with scores for hours met, CO₂, renewables and rough cost; save your mixes to a table and sort the resources by renewable, from the Sun and available at any hour.
Energy, work and power · covers the O-Level, IGCSE, GCSE topic
What the sim shows
A made-up town (chosen numbers): its demand is 40 MW at night, rises to 88 MW in the morning and peaks at 100 MW at 19:00; 1647 MWh over the day. Each fader switches on a station in 10 MW steps. Each hour the model runs coal, nuclear, biofuel and geothermal steadily at their setting (they are slow to start and to change), takes what the wind, the Sun and the tide give (solar: sunrise 7:00, sunset 19:00, about 30 % under cloud; tide: high water at 02:00 and every 12.42 h, no power at high or low water), and then calls on hydroelectric and gas, which can change within minutes, for what is still needed. An hour is met when the supply reaches the demand. CO₂ index: rough, relative, from memory and rounded: coal 1 per MWh generated, gas about 0.5, biofuel counted as 0 net (idealised: new plants take the CO₂ back in as they grow), the rest 0 while running. Cost points are chosen, rough and relative, never money. Idealised: the reservoir never runs dry in a day; stations start at once when the day begins; no energy is lost in the cables; the building of the stations is left out of the CO₂. Which stations run steadily and which follow the demand, the turning down of wind and solar, and the cost points are beyond the syllabus; they show why reliability matters.
- The town's block of flats: the part to watch (its windows go dark in a power cut)
- Model power stations, the town, the control desk with a fader for each resource, the grid meter
- Colour: one per resource, the same on its fader, its station's lamp and the day chart
Use it in your lessons
- Try it here: anyone can unlock 2 figures free, and a free account unlocks up to 5. Runs on a laptop, a Chromebook or a phone; nothing to install.
- Present it and share student links with the teacher plan, from US$5 a month, billed yearly.
- Put it on your own website or LMS for US$9, paid once, or every sim from US$29 a month.
Free guide: 12 practicals as sims, and how to run one in a lesson →
Need a version for your exact set-up? Have one made: US$49 a figure in an order of 5.
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- Combining resistors simDrag real resistors into the clips of a resistance board to wire them in series or in parallel, measure V and I with real digital meters, work out R = V ÷ I from your own readings and check it against the series and parallel formulas, and see that adding a parallel branch lowers the total while adding in series raises it.
- Efficiency: a motor lifting a load simSet the supply's voltage and the load, then time a small geared motor winding a slotted-mass load up beside a half-metre rule: read the energy in from a joulemeter (or V × I × t), work out the useful energy m g Δh and the efficiency, watch a Sankey diagram of where the energy went draw itself, and plot how the efficiency changes with the load.
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