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Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air |  |
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Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air | |
Addressing the sustainable energy crisis in an objective manner, this enlightening book analyzes the relevant numbers and organizes a plan for change on both a personal level and an international scale—for Europe, the United States, and the world. In case study format, this informative reference answers questions surrounding nuclear energy, the potential of sustainable fossil fuels, and the possibilities of sharing renewable power with foreign countries. While underlining the difficulty of minimizing consumption, the tone remains positive as it debunks misinformation and clearly explains the calculations of expenditure per person to encourage people to make individual changes that will benefit the world at large.
媒体推荐"If someone wants an overall view of how energy gets used, where it comes from, and the challenges in switching to new sources, this is the book to read." —Bill Gates, chairman, Microsoft
网友对Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air的评论
I read the free e-book first and liked it so well that I bought the paperback book to get more readable graphs and tables. It is absolutely the most factual and understandable book about sustainable energy that I have come across in 10 years of reading in this area. David MacKay avoids adjectives totally by substituting straightforward conversions of varying types of power into kilowatts and gigawatts and of energy into kilowatt-hours/day. He also calculates the land area required to implement each type of sustainable energy to weed out what he calls "country sized" energy sources. His coverage is unbiased and comprehensive. This is a must-read for anyone that wants to get past sound bites and understand how to replace current fossil fuels -- whether you are worried about global warming or just running out of fossil fuels themselves. Furthermore, his straightforward and entertaining writing style makes it a fun read.
One note: The book is written in England from that perspective. Some of the area comparisons are based on parts of England and will require conversion to square miles and states for those of us in the metrically-challenged US. This does not detract at all from the discussions.
One small irritation is that he constantly points out the fact that the per-capita energy consumption in Britain is about half of that in the US. This is partly fair due to our love affair with central heating, muscle cars, pickups and SUVs. However, having personally experienced temperatures of +113F (45C) and -30F (-34C) and driven 70+ miles (113 kilometers) between towns in the US west, I think that at least some of the criticism is overdone. A more fair per-capita comparison might be taken from New England in the US, since both are densely-populated areas in northern maritime climates warmed somewhat by the Gulf Stream. In addition, the solution he proposes to replace all transportation with electric vehicles would not work in the spread-out Western US without either radically new battery technology or battery exchanges.
Despite these small gripes this is a must-read book for energy literacy, whether you download the free e-book or purchase the book itself.
Easy read with lots of information about energy. A wonderful book full of facts about generation of electricity and options for how it can be done in the future. This is a great book with hard numbers, and not just a bunch of arming waving, and armchair theorizing. I cannot recommend this book too highly for anyone who wishes to understand the energy issues facing the industrial world.
Mr. MacKay did a wonderful job of getting a large amount of hard data together about the UK and to a lesser extent the world, an power, in particular, electrical energy use and generation, now and in the future. It was originally free on line at a web site "withoutthehotair", however as of the date of this write up, unfortunately it is no longer available on line.
MacKay is a British, so this book is written about the United KIngdom, and not the US. However, all of the basic principals and arguments that he presents can be easily applied to the USA. He starts from the place that we like the life that we live with ample and reasonably priced electricity. He does address the CO2 emission issue, for the global warming crew, so there is hard information to consider. He is not going down the hair shirt route that we all need to cut our energy use by x percent or the world will cook tomorrow. It is so nice to look at a book that deals with real numbers and the world as it is, and that people like living in this world. He looks briefly at the world and history of CO2 emission over the years essentially since before the industrial revolution.
He does a wonderful and very comprehensive job of looking at the different proposals for generating energy such as tidal, wave, wind, geothermal, etc. The specifics are tied to the UK, but they can be applied to the USA or any other country as applicable. Tidal could apply to the Bay of Fundy for example in North America. He has a breakout for where all of the energy including the electrical energy goes which is interesting. He breakouts out total energy consumption including air travel. He looks at the energy that is used for housing and different approaches. All of this is preparation for the last section of the book, where you can play king for a day, and devise your own approach to providing the required electrical power fro the UK by selecting the option that you prefer. He includes nuclear as an option.
My favorite section is 27, "Five Energy Plans for Britain", where he presents five different options to illustrate the choices that one must make in deciding what options to select among wind, tide, solar, geothermal. nuclear, solar in the desert, hydro, waste etc.
If you are confused about energy use and sustainable options then this is the book for you. David MacKay, a Physics professor at the University of Cambridge, has approached this complex and controversial topic by focusing on energy, how it's measured, produced and used, but in a simple, often humorous, approach that's easily understood. He does provide a series of technical chapters at the end of the book for those who want more detail but the beauty of this book is that you don't need to know or understand a lot of the physics to come away with a much better understanding of the issues and alternatives.
He says at one point: "When I planned this book, my intention was to ignore climate change altogether." (p240). However, he does give a summary at the beginning of the book (which he invites readers to skip if they don't want to read it) and a chapter towards the end that is geared towards understanding options such as carbon capture. He is a clear believer in anthropogenic climate change but also argues that self-sufficiency in energy is a valid goal for security and other reasons and in Britain the majority of fossil fuels and now imported.
One apparent disadvantage of this book for readers in North America is that it focuses primarily on the energy uses and options for Britain. There are some references to the situation in North America, (sometimes disparaging, sometimes enlightening) but most of the information contained in the book is helpful to readers anywhere.
In the first section of the book he builds up a balance sheet of energy usage and potential renewable energy sources. Using short chapters he looks first at an energy use, e.g. cars and then a renewable source e.g. wind and estimates current actual use and theoretical potential. There is a lot of interesting information in this section, such as the difference between wave and tidal power. What is also enjoyable about the author's style is his willingness to debunk ideas on all sides of the argument. For those who would argue for energy savings from planes, he says: "The only way to make a plane consume fuel more efficiently is to put it on the ground and stop it. Planes have been fantastically optimized". Although in the end he is able to show that the theoretical availability almost meets current use, he is quick to point out that the practical availability is significantly different. Because renewals are so diverse, the facilities needed are enormous, he explains "to get a big contribution from wind, we used wind farms with the area of Wales", for waves "wave farms covering 500km of coastline". He concludes that to sustain Britain's current lifestyle on renewables would be very difficult.
The second section of the book looks at alternative plans to address how it would be possible to eliminate the use of fossil fuels by 2050. His overall plan is in three parts 1) electrify all transport - and use "green" electricity 2)supplement solar heating by use of heat pumps -again electricity driven 3)get the electricity from 4 sources: British renewables, perhaps from "clean coal", perhaps from nuclear and from other people's renewables. His chapter on nuclear power is a good summary of the real risks and benefits of nuclear power and should be read by both proponents and opponents. His fourth source, other people's renewables is primarily referencing a plan being promoted that would develop huge solar facilities either in Algeria/Libya or Syria/Iraq/Saudi Arabia that would then link to Africa and Europe by transmission lines. Well, interesting I guess but hardly what I would call "secure", at least at the moment. This is similar to an idea that he mentions for the U.S. to build an Arizona-sized facility in the US Southwest.
This book is occasionally marred by unfortunate diversions. There is a section about the amount of energy used for defense in the UK and the nuclear defense system in the US and he compares this with the amount of energy used by the UK university system. This is really unworthy of the rest of the book. He is also rather puritan in his views of energy use. Bicycles feature frequently (reasonable in a small, flat university city like Cambridge) as do admonitions about the high settings of heating thermostats. He suggests a setting of 15C (59F) or maybe 17C (63F) and reminds us that in the early 1970s actual home temperatures were lower. I lived in Britain at that time as a young adult and I can still remember how miserable that was.
Fortunately these examples are rare and I would recommend any reader to pass over them as there is a great deal of value in this book. Although it is inevitably a little out of date in energy developments such as fracking, it forms a very useful and easy to understand basis for debating and evaluating energy options.
The production of the book is exceptional, splendid color images; they spared no expense in creating this book. I was pretty familiar with the subject already having read six books on renewable energy in preparation for writing my own book on renewable energy in Hawaii where I live. Mr. MacKay's work was recommended by Bill gates of Microsoft a pretty powerful endorsement. The book is available online for free as an eBook, I am old school in that I like the look and feel of a book that I can take to the beach, or to bed. I recommend this book It has earned a position in my library. I think that the subject is extremely important and timely. AR. Kassel author of Hawaiian Missionaries.
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