50 Energy Books

My New Years Resolution was to read one book every week for a year. Distilling the most important facts down to a single infographic for each was much more challenging than anticipated. Along with crazy work hours and an incessant pile of pages waiting for me by my bedside each night, it was difficult to motivate myself to read some days. The common question I get is "How do you have time to read?" Honestly, one hour a day and really long Saturdays will do it. A second question I get is "Aren't these books repetitive? How much do you actually learn?" To which I say each book (even if they cover the same topic, like sustainable energy) covers it from a new angle- historical, economic, scientific, entrepreneurial, anthropological, etc. I guess it just depends.  So what is energy? 

Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air by David MacKay Read the book for free here . Main Points: Society has an addiction to fossil fuels, as the developed world gets 80-90% of our energy from fossil fuels. Why is this not sustainable? Three reasons. Easily accessible fossil fuels is a finite resource, consuming them creates massive carbon dioxide emissions, and our security is determined by our dependence on others for fossil fuels.  Understanding sustainable energy in terms of comprehensible and comparable quantities is rather simple: 1 kWh is one lightbulb for 24 hours. We consume 3kWh/day of food. Our bath is 5 kWh. A liter of petroleum is 10 kWh. If you drive 100 km you use 80 kWh. If you fl then you may use 10,000 kWh.  How fast we use energy? We use 80kWh/day by running a standard North American house.  The average European spends 125 kWh/day The average American spends 250 kWh/day 1 kWh/day ~ 40 Watts Switching off a phone charger for an enti...

Consider a Spherical Cow: A Course in Environmental Problem Solving by John Harte Main Points: What is the "spherical cow" joke ? The phrase comes from a joke about theoreticians I first heard as a graduate student. Milk production at a dairy farm was low so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the farmer received the write-up and opened it to read on the first line: "Consider a spherical cow..." The Approach : The spherical cow approach to problem solving involves the stripping away of unnecessary detail, so that only the essentials remain. Of course, approaching the complex world from the spherical cow perspective...

Should We Risk It? by Daniel M. Kammen & David M. Hassenzahl Main Points: " I began by trying to quantify technical risks, thinking that if they were 'put into perspective' through comparison with familiar risks we could better judge their social acceptability. I am ashamed now of my naivety, although I have the excuse that this was more than 20 years ago, while some people are still doing it today. "- Harry Otway (1992) Background: Daniel Kammen teaches a course at UC Berkeley called "Environmental Classics" where they rotate through key papers/books like Amory Lovins' paper "A Road Not Taken", the Wedges paper. They read the original items- the critiques that came at the time and the critiques that come after. Only Silent Spring  becomes a fixture in the course year after year.  Take a look at Kammen's lab RAEL and BREG  for sustainability tools and what tools we need to alter the dialogue around clean energy or sus...

Renewables: The Politics of a Global Energy Transition by Michaël Aklin and Johannes Urpelainen Main Points:  “Renewables: The Politics of a Global Energy Transition” explores why certain countries like Germany and Denmark were so successful in sustaining a renewable energy transition, while other countries like the US, France, and UK have not.  The answer: a mix of policies (feed-in tariffs), pro-renewable agricultural cooperatives, private ownership of renewables by communities of citizens. Whereas the US made renewables highly politicized. So when did renewable energy become so politicized in the US? The 1980’s. The graph in the infographic shows that the pre-Reagan and post-Reagan divide in Congressional votes on legislation pertaining to renewable adoption. The gap grows pretty wide before 1981 vs. after 1981.  J. Uprelainen posits that certain external shocks create windows of opportunity for renewables to penetrate the status quo (called "carbon lock-...

Cold Cash, Cool Climate by Jon Koomey, PhD Main Points: Jon Koomey's talk is about computing energy efficiency. He had worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and now is at the Steyer-Taylor Center.  The computing trend that will change everything- revolutionary change is going to be driven by the energy efficiency of computing and devices. Enabling proliferation of gadgets that are cheap, smart, small, connected, and low power.  Example: Proteus Biomedical makes a device that goes inside a placebo pill and the digestive system juices sends a signal to a device on your skin that tells the doctor when you take your medication. Research question: How has the energy efficiency of computing changed over time? Number of components in an IC vs. Manufacturing Cost per component. The minimum point of the curve is the point of lowest cost of production. The progression of the minimum points of these curves is Moore's Law. Work for servers- energy use, cost, and...

The Great Texas Wind Rush By Kate Galbraith and Asher Price Main Points: In 2006, Texas was passing California to become the nation's #1 wind power state.  Texas remains number one in wind power (12,000 megawatts) and about 9% on the Texas electric grid came from wind. The next closest state (California) has less than half of the amount that Texas does.  On particular windy days, the amount of wind power on the Texas grid climbs above 20%.  Texas wind themes Relationship between wind power and oil Connection between Texas wind and Texas music Jay Carter Sr and Jay Carter Jr operated out of Burkburnett (couple hours north of Dallas in what was once considered Boomtown USA), one of many towns in the US where oil was booming.  Texas wind predates the 1970's energy crisis. Even 150 years ago wind power was going strong in the Great Plains (water windmills helped pull water out of the aquifer so that the plains could be fruitful). Midlands Texas was kno...

Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve  By Ian Morris Main Points: The book is based on the Princeton Tanner Lectures, where he tried to explain the wildly different ideas about "fairness". Where do ideas of fairness come from?  Two big theories on fairness Evolutionary psychology side Primatologists have shown that if you give a monkey a small pebble, you can train the monkey to give you back the pebble. You can give them a reward- a green pepper. The primatologists (Dr. Brosnan) said that every so often one monkey will get a cherry tomato as opposed to a small green pepper. Some monkeys look at their pepper and assume that life is unfair and eat the pepper. Some monkeys refuse to play the game. Some monkeys get angry and throw it at the experimentalist. Evolutionary built-in effect driven by genes: This brings about the concept of "monkey values" and how these values are passed on to the next generation depends on your g...

The Age of Sustainable Development by Jeffrey D. Sachs Main Points: Johan Rockstrom's 2009 Nature  diagram on a Safe Operating Space for Humanity Anthropocene: We have left the Holocene, the period 10,000 years ago when agriculture got started until now. We are in a new geological epoch. Paul Krudsen coined this term and might have meant it as a metaphor that humanity had become so large that it could change the planet. If you apply the same criteria to the end of former epochs, would you say that we are in a new era? The answer is yes.  Three events about 43 years ago made an impact: (1) UN Conference on Environment and Development in Stockholm (2) Publication of 'Limits to Growth' and it is possible to overshoot the Earth's ecosystem (3) Jeffrey Sachs joined Harvard as a freshman.  Central component of the Industrial Revolution- it was the ability for the mega-transformation of energy. All work that we can do in the world- construction or running spi...

The Making of the Atomic Bomb By Richard Rhodes As the French nuclear scientist Bertrand Goldschmidt once said, "From a laboratory bench in 1939, the Manhattan Project expanded in scale until by the end of the war it was comparable in scale of investment and number of employees to the United States Automobile Industry in 1945." Main Points: Over the years the idea of the making of the atomic bomb has shrunk in scale to one man (Robert Oppenheimer), one bomb (Hiroshima), and one place (Los Alamos). But the point of the book is to expand the view and broaden the perspective of this nuclear age- large, complicated, and expensive an effort it was. Critical mass of plutonium is about 5-6 kg and most modern weapons use plutonium cores of about 3 kg. It is a very dense metal, about twice as heavy as lead. Uranium takes a bit more materials (15 kg is the critical mass). We aren't talking about too much, but it was difficult to enrich this material. The Manhattan P...

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari Main Points: Back 70,000 years ago, our ancestors homo sapiens  who were living in East-Africa were unimportant animals. Their impact on the ecological system was irrelevant. But if you look at the world today we dominate this planet. Main question: how exactly did we go from there to here?  Main answer: We are the only animal that managed to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees: can cooperate in large numbers, but are not flexible. The bees are not going to reinvent their social system and execute the queen bee and establish a communist dictatorship of worker bees if the community faces difficulty.  Chimpanzees: are flexible, but cannot cooperate in large numbers. A bunch of chimpanzees in the train station would be absolute chaos. Put 1,000 humans vs. 1,000 chimpanzees, the humans would win because they can work together, but the chimpanzees cannot do so. What enables humans to coop...

Six Easy Pieces/ Six Not-So-Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman Main Points: Richard Feynman was a professor at Caltech who taught freshman physics (1961-1963). Parts of his famous Lectures on Physics are in these two books. He won the 1965 Nobel Prize for work on quantum electrodynamics (QED). We can imagine a freely moving electron not just traveling in straight line from A to B but taking many wiggly routes. So when an electron hits a target screen, many paths need to be integrated- Feynman's "path-integral" method. The "Feynman diagrams" helped calculate the probability of subatomic reactions. All of the  famous Feynman Lectures  can be found online- courtesy of the California Institute of Technology! Feynman was adamantly opposed to authority and blind reverence to those who philosophize. To get a feel for his humorous and intellectual lecturing style you need to watch his  video lecture on entropy . "There is no difference between past...

The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia by Lutz Kleveman Main Points: Oil/natural gas production in the Middle East and Central Asia is unresolved due to political tensions and the power struggle between the United States and Russia. Russia- would like oil from the Caspian Sea to be diverted north to their borders or to the Black Sea at their port at Novorossisk.  Iran- would like oil to be transported to the southern port and enter the Strait of Hormuz, while they receive oil in the north where their population is concentrated. United States- would like to have oil transported west from Baku (Azerbaijan) to Poti (Chechnya/Georgia) to Ceyhan (Turkey). So that they can ultimately be accessed at the Mediterranean Sea. The Caspian Sea: Is it a sea or is it a lake? Why does it matter? Five Littoral States: Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Azerbaijan have not come to an agreement on the territorial division of the Caspian Sea. Lake: "If the Caspian ...

Electricity System Planning with Distributed Energy Resources by Jesse Jenkins (PhD Thesis, MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society) Main Points: Who:  Dr. Jesse Jenkins is a recent graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned an MS in Technology & Policy, and a PhD in Engineering Systems. He worked as a researcher in the MIT Energy Initiative research consortium studying the evolution of the delivery of electricity services and the role of distributed energy resources in the power system of the Future. He is an NSF graduate Research Fellow and was the former Director of the Breakthrough Institute's Energy and Climate Program.  What : This PhD Thesis offers a new framework for electricity system capacity planning with distributed energy resources and flexible and price-responsive demand.  Dr. Jenkins first uses AC power flow simulations to derive equations on resistive losses and net demand reduction. He t...

Burn Out: The Endgame for Fossil Fuels by Dieter Helm Main Points: Immediate Challenges : Trump Executive Orders, Chinese Coal-to-Liquid, Sale of Aramco Stake, Russian Arctic Drilling, Keystone Pipeline, smart meters, etc. Three Big Structural Changes : Long run oil price End of the commodity super-cycle and fall of oil prices. Oil price will fall forever and $50 is a high price for oil. The price might spike, but the long-term trend is constant. Supply increases as oil prices fall. Decarbonization Unstoppable and we need to do better to make progress on climate change. Digitalization of the Economy Radical technical change (robots/AI/3D printing/ electric cars) and what is going to happen to our economies. New technologies and digitalization will impact economies. The future of energy will be about electricity. Two promising aspects of solar technology: (1) opening the larger extent of the solar spectrum (2) transformation of absorption to actual ...