Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air with David MacKay
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as an approachable, numbers-driven overview of what renewable energy would take.
What it is
David MacKay, scientific advisor to the UK energy department, gives a Harvard talk on sustainable energy at macro and micro scale, drawn from his book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. It stresses the land area renewables require.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2015 to 2017.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec IkmoIkmo · 2015-05 · on “Tesla Energy”
I felt the 'area needed in the US' to be a bit disingenuous. I very much recommend David Mackay's Without the Hot Air, a great talk he did at Harvard on area required can be found here: [this video] Beyond that, very glad to see this happen. It's one of the factors necessary to push a sustainable electrified future forward.
Recommends yan · 2016-09 · on “Atmospheric carbon dioxide passes 400ppm”
I recently started reading "Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air"[1], which is available as a free book, and it's been a wonderful introduction to reasoning about alternative energy. The author also gave a talk a few years ago that is very approachable[2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]
Recommends spodek · 2017-03 · on “Eigg – A small Scottish isle that runs on 90-95% renewable energy”
If you haven't read Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air , by David Mackay, I recommend it. Free download: [LINK] About the author: David MacKay FRS is the Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and then obtained his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. He is internationally known for his research in machine learning, information theory, and communication systems, including the invention of Dasher, a software interface that enables efficient communication in any language with any muscle. He was appointed
Cites IkmoIkmo · 2015-05 · on “Output of Dutch solar bike lane exceeds expectations”
Very good point. Plus even if the marginal cost is lower than a dedicated solar facility, we don't necessarily have that luxury. We do if we want just 5% sustainable energy, not a problem. But if we want 99% sustainable energy, surface area is a very tricky challenge [0] and so it'd be a matter of the one and the other, instead of the one or the other. [0] [this video]