What do the following people have in common?
Tony Juniper
Former Executive Director, Friends of the Earth
Peter Ainsworth MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
Sir David King FRS
Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, 2000–08
Lord Oxburgh KBE FRS
Former Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell
Chris Goodall
Author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet
Prof Ian Fells CBE
Founder chairman of NaREC, the New and Renewable Energy Centre
Duncan McLaren
Chief Executive, Friends of the Earth Scotland
Prof Mike Ashby FRS
Author of Materials and the environment
Robert Sansom
Director of Strategy and Sustainable Development EDF Energy
Dr Derek Pooley CBE
Former Chief Scientist at the Department of Energy, Chief Executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority and Member of the European Union Advisory Group on Energy
Prof Robert Hinde CBE FRS FBA
Executive Committee, Pugwash UK
They have all read and given their views on the book,
'Sustainable Energy — without the hot air' by David Mackay.
David MacKay is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. He says of his book, which was published in 2009:
"I didn’t write this book to make money. I wrote it because sustainable energy is important. If you would like to have the book for free for your own use, please help yourself: it’s on the internet at www.withouthotair.com. This is a free book in a second sense: you are free to use all the material in this book, except for the cartoons and the photos with a named photographer,
under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share- Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence. (The cartoons and photos are excepted because the authors have generally given me permission only to include their work, not to share it under a Creative Commons license.) You are especially welcome to use my materials for educational purposes. My website includes separate high-quality files for each of the figures in the book."
I have reprinted these extracts from the following web page please click here
I got as far as printing off the book, but so far I've only managed to dip into it.
ReplyDeleteIt makes some excellent points though, with the general theme being that we need to see numbers for all the ambitious claims for the cost and practicality of green power. It's all very well the sociologists, politicians and ecologists trumpeting the renewable cause, but the engineering needs to be proved to work reliably and economically and so far I'm less than convinced it does.
If green energy is going to cost, say, twice as much as 'dirty' energy, then the public will need to be prepared to pay that cost if they're serious about it.
The problem is that when you speak to many of the green brigade, their eyes tend to mist over when you start showing them calculations and engineering assessments, but that's what's going to provide the working solution eventually - something developed by a dull wee grey engineer with dandruff and polyester trousers, not one of the green media darlings with a hugo boss suit and a degree in corporate communications.
We need to think long and hard about things but we are all losing the capability to do so I fear
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