David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air is a remarkably engaging book; it has certainly kicked off and contributed to some very energetic discussions here. The book, which was written by a physics professor at Cambridge and is available for free online, is essentially a detailed numerical consideration of renewable forms of power generation, as well as technologies to support it, and to reduce total power demand. MacKay concludes that the effort required to produce sustainable energy systems is enormous, and that one of the most viable options is to build huge solar facilities in the world’s deserts, and use that to provide an acceptable amount of energy to everyone.
The book has a physics and engineering perspective, rather than one focused on politics or business. MacKay considers the limits of what is physically possible, given the character of the world and the physical laws that govern it. Given that he does not take economics into consideration much, his conclusions demonstrate the high water mark of what is possible, with unlimited funds. In the real world, renewable deployment will be even more challenging than it is in his physics-only model.
Here are some of the posts in which the book has already been discussed:
- David MacKay’s sustainable energy calculations
- A renewable energy plan for the UK
- Carnot efficiency
- Increasing renewable capacity is much harder than increasing energy consumption
I have added relevant information from the book to the comment sections of a great many other posts, on everything from wind power to biofuels.
Even if you don’t agree with MacKay’s analysis, reading his book will provide some useful figures, graphs, and equations, as well as prompt a lot of thought. It is certainly one of the books that I would recommend most forcefully to policy makers, analysts, politicians, and those interested in deepening their understanding of what a sustainable energy future would involve.
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Errata for the published book are here
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No power cuts danger – Miliband
There is “no danger” of mass power cuts in the UK during the next decade, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has said.
He told the BBC it was possible to meet the country’s energy needs while using more “sustainable” sources such as wind farms and nuclear stations.
Last week the government’s new energy adviser warned that the UK could face blackouts by 2016 as green energy is coming on stream too slowly.
But Mr Miliband said building projects would be completed in time.
Cambridge University researcher David MacKay, who takes up his post as adviser at the Department of Energy on 1 October, has warned that the public will keep objecting to facilities such as wind farms and nuclear power stations being constructed near their homes.
From Turbines and Straw, Danish Self-Sufficiency
“Last year, the Danish island of Samso (pronounced SOME-suh) completed a 10-year experiment to see whether it could become energy self-sufficient. The islanders, with generous amounts of aid from mainland Denmark, busily set themselves about erecting wind turbines, installing nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces to heat their sturdy brick houses and placing panels here and there to create electricity from the island’s sparse sunshine. By their own accounts, the islanders have met the goal. For energy experts, the crucial measurement is called energy density, or the amount of energy produced per unit of area, and it should be at least 2 watts for every square meter, or 11 square feet. ‘We just met it,’ said Soren Hermansen, the director of the local Energy Academy, a former farmer who is a consultant to the islanders.”
December 1, 2009, 8:12 am
100 Percent Renewables by 2030?
By KATE GALBRAITH
Could the world get to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030? Not a chance, say most analysts.
But in an article last month in Scientific American, two California academics outline a path to this amount through “millions of wind turbines, water machines and solar installations.”
The paper, by Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and Mark Delucchi, a research scientist at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, envisions 3.8 million large wind turbines, accounting for just over half of electricity demand in 2030. These would be augmented by 90,000 solar plants and other renewable technologies like tidal and geothermal power.
The turbines “would occupy about 1 percent of the earth’s land, but the empty space among turbines could be used for agriculture or ranching or as open land or ocean,” the paper states. Solar plants (not counting rooftop installations) would take up 0.33 percent of the earth’s land.