
Keeping David MacKay's 'Sustainable Energy – without the hot air' up-to-date - ZeroGravitas
https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1wmjjz87t09usoq6jva
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titojankowski
Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

I quit my job because of David MacKay's work. Terrific, inspiring book. Now
I'm building a global network of climate-change labs called Impossible Labs.
Would love to connect with entrepreneurs who love SEWTHA, maybe we could do a
meetup in SF (tito@impossiblelabs.io)

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logancg
Not in SF, but just wanted to pass on that I took a look through your personal
site and really enjoy it. Best of luck with Impossible Labs!

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titojankowski
Thanks for the encouragement :)

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epistasis
This is a fantastic effort. The original book was an amazing attempt at
napkin-mathing away innumerate arguments.

However, I think that people that read it now can sometimes come away thinking
that sustainable energy is pretty difficult, or that heavy nuclear will be the
most cost effective way to get rid of carbon in our energy.

Technology trends drastically change the practicality of napkin math that's
not even a decade old. It has turned solar from cost ineffective to cost
effective. Another decade is going to make storage extremely cheap, as in
2x-10x cheaper. At that point, we will just need to build our solar and wind
arrays to capture enough energy at their seasonal minimums.

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lemming
The main point that I took away from the book is the phrase that country-scale
generation using wind and solar requires country-sized installations. While
it's great that the cost of solar is falling rapidly, there's still a
theoretical maximum efficiency which we can ever reach. IIRC that's around the
30% mark, and the updates in the OP suggest that for large-scale panels the
efficiency has increased from around 10% to around 16%. It discusses other
possible but unproven advances which might increase the efficiency more
(multi-layer tech, for example). They say: "...companies are now developing
multi-layer PV panels that will deliver (although timing remains uncertain)
efficiencies greater than 30%". While this is clearly excellent news, it's
still only a possible 3x improvement in the future which means we just need
installations the size of a smaller country.

Basically, it doesn't matter that the cost has dropped if we simply can't
generate enough electricity that way. They discuss the possibility of
generating 50% of the UK's total _energy_ needs (not electricity needs) via
solar and point out that it's not as ridiculous an idea as it was when Dr
McKay wrote the book, but it's clear that we still need some fairly massive
increases in technology to get there - e.g. storage, transport, routing.
Perhaps they will happen quickly or perhaps they won't, it's very hard to tell
at this stage.

tl;dr: I'm really happy to read that solar is improving, but price alone is
not the only factor. It's a big one, but it's far from the only one.

Edit: also, in case it wasn't clear - I'd be ecstatic if this data were kept
up to date. I was actually wondering about this just yesterday.

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taneq
I don't understand why everyone focuses on efficiency. (Okay, it makes sense
in the U.K. with their combination of high population density, high latitude,
and awful weather, but for large parts of the world it doesn't.) Total watts
per dollar (including mounting hardware, cabling etc.) is the figure you
should focus on.

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pilom
[http://withouthotair.com/about.html](http://withouthotair.com/about.html) \-
"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. This website includes
links to separate high-quality files for each of the figures in the book.

A note to pirates, this license does not allow you or anyone to print and sell
the book on amazon marketplace!"

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logancg
This would be a fantastic idea.

SEWTHA made me see the world in a completely new way. When I finished it, I
started seeing everything I use, see, or have as an energy process. I felt
like I learned a first-principles toolkit I could use to break down anything
in terms of energy.

I highly recommend this book to everyone – especially if you're serious about
thinking about climate change. No BS, no platitudes – just energy from a
practical physics perspective.

Updating it today could make it an even more important educational tool for
thinking about climate change.

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titojankowski
Hi everybody, I put the book up on GitHub:
[https://github.com/titojankowski/sustainable_energy_without_...](https://github.com/titojankowski/sustainable_energy_without_the_hot_air)

MacKay in his brilliance published the book under a Creative Commons license
for non-commercial use
([https://www.withouthotair.com/about.html](https://www.withouthotair.com/about.html)).

Feel free to modify and make changes to the repo. Would love to continue what
MacKay started!

Tito (tito@impossiblelabs.io)

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ycombinator-uit
New Google Group set up:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sewtha-second-
editio...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sewtha-second-edition)

The welcome message is: \-- This is a Google Group for discussions about
updating David MacKay's "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air" book.
Sadly, David died just about a year ago, and he had done only preliminary work
on revisions.

The group is set up by UIT Cambridge. We published the first edition of
David's book, and want to publish an updated edtion, under the same Creative
Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales
Licence.

We have already been speaking to David's family and former colleagues, to work
out how best to create an updated edition. We want to keep his voice and his
approach and his insight, and above all his rigour. It will take a few months
to work through that. In the meantime, let's identify what needs to be changed
in the existing edition, and what needs to be added to a new one. \-- Niall
Mansfield (I was David's editor for the first edition, and worked closely with
him on that for 6 months.)

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tomfitz
Great idea! This book is excellent, and though the principles are timeless, it
would be a shame if the data became outdated.

Sadly the source code for the book doesn't appear to be published. This is
unlike David Mackay's otherbook, "Information Theory, Inference & Learning
Algorithms", does have the LaTeX source published (see
[http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html)
), though not in an open source license.

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sid-kap
TeX source for the book is available at
[http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/](http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/).
I believe this is the latest version.

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Safety1stClyde
It looks like that is the actual working directory and some files were not
saved properly. The #BushOnGrass.tex# files with # at the start and end are
backups made by Emacs, and usually deleted when the file is saved correctly.

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beagle3
Tangentially related: The first (to my knowledge) MacKay fellow was elected 5
days ago: [http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/?p=2038](http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/?p=2038)

