Month: June 2020

This heated (environmental) debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public debates, people just say “Nuclear is a money pit” or “We have a huge amount of wave and wind.” The trouble with this sort of language is that it’s not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to know how the one “huge” compares with another “huge,” namely our huge energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not adjectives.

The book tries to quantitatively check how a world driven by renewable energy would like. The calculations look at possibilities, how much we can produce, compared with how much we consume, in terms of kW, ignoring the costs of technologies and deployment. Only if the numbers add up is checked.

The research is divided into three parts. First part is taking different classes of consumption and production and stacks them into two columns, seeing how the numbers look like, The second part explores scenarios involving various deployments of renewable electricity technologies or carbon reduction. Finally, the third part presents the technical analysis behind the numbers presented.

The analysis focuses on the United Kingdom, investigating how much the country can produce in terms of renewable electricity and looking at different scenarios, including imports for more renewable-potent neighbours.

The investigation by David MacKey is looking at the key problems of energy sustainability, checking real energy consumption, not only electricity, but including for example transport, products we buy and agriculture.

Although feeling a bit dated sometimes, Sustainable Energy, first published in 2008, still brings insightful findings. It is one the most, if not the most comprehensive analysis of how realistic a renewable future is.

Unfortunately, David MacKey passed away in 2016, but his superb analysis remains. He was Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge.

I recommend the first part of the book to everyone interested in energy, while the third part is really for only those really into the topic.

This is the first book I post which was read on my new e-reader.