Network education partner SRUC explains why a career in energy - whether it be as a farmer growing crops or a scientist working on an improved wave power, will make a valuable contribution to the sustainability of our planet.

Energy is the most basic part of our existence. Have you ever thought about how we transform energy and how we use it? Scientists today are trying to find new ways of capturing and using energy.

Ultimately we all rely on only one source of energy - the sun - the source of all our energy.

The sun pours energy onto our planet every day, and from this we derive life.

Energy in the form of heat drives our climate, evaporating water from the sea and dropping it as rain to feed our crops. By photosynthesis, green plants convert solar energy into chemical energy, providing our daily food, and millions of years ago plankton and small sea creatures created by the sun's energy died and were squeezed into that most dense form of energy we use today, oil.

Oil took millions of years to create, but our huge demand for it means that we will use it up in a few hundred years. The big challenge for mankind is to find a replacement for oil, because without it the planet would be unable to sustain the 7 billion people who live here using current renewable technologies. Scientists are trying to find new ways of capturing and then efficiently using energy from the sun without having to wait for oil to be created.

Solar, wind and hydro are just a few of the ways scientists are trying to capture energy without waiting for oil to be made. There are three parts to the science of managing energy; how to capture and concentrate it, how to store it, and how to use it efficiently.

If we were to use current technology to grow biofuel to power our cars virtually all the arable land of Scotland would be used for producing biofuels and none left to grow that other form of energy we all use - food. If all the cars on the M8 ran on biofuel we would need a 5 mile wide field of oilseed rape or similar oil crop the length of the motorway just to keep them running.

Wind and wave power have great potential in Scotland. Whitelees, near Glasgow, is one of Europe's biggest land based wind farms and one of the most efficient, thanks to being on the west coast of a muddy island with lots of sea between it and Canada. This means that there is plenty of room for the weather to pick up the sun's energy and form wind energy. There are no large lumps of land to get in the way and absorb energy. Some of that wind energy is lost to the sea and transformed into wave energy. So here we are on the west coast of Scotland with lots of energy being dumped on our shores and land. Scientists in Scotland are at the leading edge of research finding new ways of capturing that energy, and concentrating it to a point that it becomes useful to us as electricity.

We do not have the all answers now, scientists are working hard to improve the way we create useable energy, harness it and use it efficiently. A career in energy, whether it be as a farmer growing crops or a scientist working on an improved wave power, will make a valuable contribution to the sustainability of our planet.

To read more on career ideas for parents and children, read our supplement by clicking here.