Harvard University
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2015–2017
1:06:03 · 104K views · Oct 25, 2010
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.
HN recommends it as an approachable, numbers-driven overview of what renewable energy would take.
4 comments from Hacker News
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.
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 a Lecturer in the Department of Physics at Cambridge in 1995 and was a Professor in the Department of Physics from 2003 to 2013. Since 2005, he has devoted much of his time to public teaching about energy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Nine months after the publication of 'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air', David MacKay was appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. TED talk: [LINK] Harvard talk: this video
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
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