Sustainable Energy – without the hot air

www.withouthotair.com – The entire book is available as a free download.

This is a quite simply brilliant book. It breaks our current energy use and production down, and then looks at options to decarbonise the economy. The genius part is that David McKay uses simple, easy to understand units – energy is measured in kilowatts, and power in kilowatt hours per day per person. This makes it easy to understand the different options and effects thereof.

It also demolishes the ‘every little bit helps’ memes thats seem to surround this topic. To quote the book ‘if everyone does a little, we’ll only achieve a little’. For example, MTV recently ran an ad campaign highlighting phone chargers – it would be interesting to know what the carbon cost of this campaign was, versus any possible carbon savings. The suggestion to plug out your phone charger is shown to save approximately 0.01 kWh per day. This means that switching your charger off for an entire day will save the same amount of energy used in driving the average family car for one second. As McKay says, this is much like ‘bailing the titanic with a tea spoon’.

Another point to note is on hydrogen vs. electric cars. The latest BMW hydrogen car uses 254 kWh per 100km. The current Tesla Roadster uses 15 kWh per 100km. Quite apart from the massive energy and cost associated with building a network of hydrogen filling stations and the distribution network to go with it, and the fact that the Tesla is currently available  while a production version of the hydrogen car is some way off, we quite simply cannot afford to invest in a mode of transport as inefficient as hydrogen. In an age when it looks like energy supplies are about to start a long, and possibly quite steep decline, it is quite simply a waste of resources to pursue the hydrogen car.

The book is available for free, in its entirety, at the above link.