Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air: 2 - Hardcover

David J. C. MacKay

4.42

1,748 ratings by Goodreads

9781906860011: Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air: 2

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1906860017 ISBN 13: 9781906860011

Publisher: UIT Cambridge, 2008

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We have an addiction to fossil fuels, and it's not sustainable. Howcan we replace fossil fuels? How can we ensure security of energysupply? How can we solve climate change?We're often told that;huge amounts of renewable power are available;- wind, wave, tide, and so forth. But our current power consumption is also huge! To understand our sustainable energy crisis, we need to know how the one compares with the other. We need numbers, not adjectives.This book shows how to estimate the numbers, and what those number sdepend on. Taking the United Kingdom as an example, it asks first;could Britain live on renewable energy resources alone?; and second;how can a country like Britain make a realistic post-fossil-fuel energy plan that adds up?; It answers these questions in detail,bringing home the size of the changes that society must undergo if sustainable living is to be achieved. It's not going to be easy to make an energy plan that adds up - but it is possible.A special feature of the book is that it avoids sensationalist numbers. Where others deliberately use incomprehensibly large or small numbers to shock the reader, this book uses numbers and comparisons to illuminate. For example, energy consumption and production are made accessible by expressing them in terms of the energy used per person, per day.This book can also save you more than its cover price by helping you cut your energy bills!

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Review:

... may be the best technical book about the environment that I've ever read. This is to energy and climate what Freakonomics is to economics. --Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

A tour de force ... As a work of popular science it is exemplary ... For anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the real problems involved [it] is the place to start. --Economist.com

The first factual meme on renewable energy? A book about climate change that gets rave reviews from folk at oil companies, environmental groups and the Number One Blog of All Time has to be worth a peek. --Energysource, The Financial Times

About the Author:

David MacKay is a Professor in the Department of Physics atCambridge University. He obtained his PhD in Computation and NeuralSystems at the California Institute of Technology. His researchinterests include reliable computation with unreliable hardware, andcommunication systems for the disabled. An acclaimed teacher and communicator,he has given popular public lectures on Sustainable Energy since 2005.He is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Climate Change.

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