Energy Revolution: The Physics and the Promise of Efficient Technology by Mara Prentiss (PDF)

Description

Energy can be neither created nor destroyed―but it can be wasted. The United States wastes two-thirds of its energy, including 80 percent of the energy used in transportation. So the nation has a tremendous opportunity to develop a sensible energy policy based on benefits and costs. But to do that we need facts―not hyperbole, not wishful thinking. Mara Prentiss presents and interprets political and technical information from government reports and press releases, as well as fundamental scientific laws, to advance a bold claim: wind and solar power could generate 100 percent of the United States’ average total energy demand for the foreseeable future, even without waste reduction.To meet the actual rather than the average demand, significant technological and political hurdles must be overcome. Still, a U.S. energy economy based entirely on wind, solar, hydroelectricity, and biofuels is within reach. The transition to renewables will benefit from new technologies that decrease energy consumption without lifestyle sacrifices, including energy optimization from interconnected smart devices and waste reduction from use of LED lights, regenerative brakes, and electric cars. Many countries cannot obtain sufficient renewable energy within their borders, Prentiss notes, but U.S. conversion to a 100 percent renewable energy economy would, by itself, significantly reduce the global impact of fossil fuel consumption.Enhanced by full-color visualizations of key concepts and data, Energy Revolution answers one of the century’s most crucial questions: How can we get smarter about producing and distributing, using and conserving, energy?

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “In this important book, Mara Prentiss brings basic physics to bear on the critical issue of how we produce and consume energy. Using extensive and illuminating graphics to augment her clear writing, she provides a reason for optimism about the role of renewables in our energy future.”―Kenneth W. Ford, author of 101 Quantum Questions“With all the justified excitement around the fracking revolution it’s crucial not to lose sight of the ultimate importance of renewables and energy efficiency. Mara Prentiss has written a highly valuable, scientifically grounded guide to the great things that are possible in both these spheres.”―Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard University“A surprisingly optimistic analysis of the world’s unsustainable, wasteful energy consumption…In a genre rife with forecasts of doom and exhortations in favor of frugal living, Prentiss provides impressive evidence that things may work out just fine.”―Kirkus Reviews“In this crisp, evidence-based treatise, physicist Mara Prentiss makes a remarkable assertion: that solar and wind power could supply 100% of average U.S. energy needs for the next 50 years. Prentiss argues that a transition to renewables is probable, given that energy revolutions are a historical norm. She stacks up reams of salient data, such as the fact that U.S. energy use per capita has remained steady since 1965, thanks to increasing fuel efficiency. Although optimistic, her analyses of energy sources, combinations, conservation and storage compel.”―Barbara Kiser, Nature“[Prentiss] steers a steady course between the wishful thinking and despair that so often colors discussions of energy. Carefully optimistic, the author thinks a combination of renewable power sources could meet 100 percent of the U.S. average total energy demand for the foreseeable future, even without waste reduction…Delightful, deadpan flashes of wit enliven the text throughout…Readers looking for answers on the feasibility of renewables will find the straight talk refreshing.”―Robert Eagan, Library Journal About the Author Mara Prentiss is Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Yes we can go 100% renewable, and here’s the physics behind the claim. The math is not hard, and spelled out in easy to follow detail for those who don’t remember their high school physics. This is a must read for energy activists seeking to bridge the gap between the science and the politics.

⭐A compilation of other people’s data and some simple physics. I expected a lot more. She repeats her theme about 20 times – we got it already! And the book has many errors, both editorial and factual. It apprars that it was not proofread. I was disappointed.

⭐Truly disappointed. I plowed through the whole book hoping for some insight–or some physics and got nothing. I think the author couldn’t figure out how to approach the audience. The statistics presented were OK but had little to do with physics. The physics in the book were very very basic, basically Carnot cycle limitations. So no insights, no physics, and now novel approaches to energy issues. Which is unfortunate as physics has a lot to say about our future energy systems.

⭐Prof Prentiss presents and excellent review of current technology.Technical fundamentals are presented in lay-persons terms.I wish she had given more space to the fundamental causes of global warming

⭐Well written

⭐There is no revolution here. Becoming a female physics professor was enough for Mara. The introduction earnestly brings up conservation but the text concerns continued fulfillment of America’s gluttony. Obedient to our times, she does not recognize a BTU or lumen that wasn’t purchased. There is no mention of daylight, not a peek, no concern for Architecture, window placement, passive heating, clotheslines. Nature and what is free is not on this professor’s agenda. The technical routines the book guides us through demonstrates how Harvard students are guided to acquiesce to scientism. One can only hope for a power outage.

⭐I have to give a fairly good rating to a book that provides as much useful information as this one does. I’m in the process of writing my own book on the same subjects, and in this new work I found quite a bit of useful information to draw on. Overall, the book presents views about as close to my own as any I’ve found. Energy storage, and efficiency, are given proper emphasis. A particularly important thing mentioned was the ability of hydroelectric power to back up renewables: a dam holds a reservoir of water that can be drawn on when power from wind and solar are slack, and it can do so on short notice, providing carbon-free energy. So even though hydropower can only provide only a few percent of our average energy needs, it can provide a much larger proportion during periods of shortfall in other sources. I’d have liked to see this emphasized still more. I’d also have liked to see run-of-the-river hydropower given substantial discussion.This is the only place I’ve seen anyone try to tally the total amount of energy available from the potential energy of falling rain. Unfortunately, it was not done right; it was all based on the idea of a mythical 100-foot dam; I wonder if, by catching a lot of rainfall at much higher altitudes with small dams at a large number of locations, we might be able to make much more hydropower available than we do.The biggest flaw in the presentation is probably the inconsistent tone throughout. Prentiss makes an admirable effort to explain important concepts, sometimes at great length; but at the same time, anyone without a very good grounding in physics is going to find that the writing style makes the book very tough going. This is certainly not a can’t-put-it-down page-turner. One thing that might work much better is to take those long tutorial sections and put them in a set of appendixes.A more difficult problem may be that it’s not clear, all along, where the discussion is going. It’s an old journalistic maxim that first you tell the readers what you’re going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you told them. That is very much missing here (although the list of recommendations at the very end is a nice touch).At a more detailed level, the editing is horrible. There appears to be a heavy reliance on a spelling-checker, as indicated by the many mis-spellings that are correctly spelled words but the wrong ones, as well as occasional use of simply the wrong word, and sometimes entire missing words or possibly even whole phrases.The typography is poor from the standpoint of readability, and the thick paper makes the book thicker and heavier than it needs to be, without any apparent benefit.Early on, there are cases where stacked line charts would do a much better job of enabling comparisons, rather than multiple lines.There are at least a couple of factual errors. Page 139 says that the “area used for solar cells is completely dark” (for large installations), but this is not necessarily so–only if the area is solidly covered with panels, and this will not usually be the case. It’s usually going to be possible to have multiple uses, perhaps even combining wind turbines, solar panels, and agriculture on the same land. A more complete factual error is on page 185, where an incandescent light bulb filament is said to have about the same temperature as the surface of the Sun. This is simply wrong: Tungsten is the usual filament material precisely because it has the highest melting point, 3695 Kelvins, whereas the surface of the Sun is at about 5780 Kelvins. Light bulbs have a color similar to the Sun (which people tend to find pleasing) because sunlight is subject to some filtering by our atmosphere.I think this book has real potential because of its important content and its advocacy of the right energy policies, but it needs extensive re-working. (I’d be delighted to help with that, if that should be possible, but this is not an appeal for that.)

⭐“Energy Revolution” should be required reading for all thoughtful people concerned with the quality of life on our planet and most especially for those persons charged with the responsibility of determining government policy on energy. In a world governed by logic and for a government dedicated to doing what’s best for its people, Professor Prentiss’ book is a well written road map to achieving a better world. I wish I could be confident that we had such people in charge of our energy policy.You need not delve too far into the book to see some very easy to do concrete suggestions. One suggestion is to have the people who control the wind farms put a solar array under the wind turbines. The double use of the land would increase efficiency and lower cost and be complementary. That suggestion, so far as I know, has fallen on deaf ears. Solar advocates denigrate wind power and vice-a versa. In our world, winning is everything and our best interest is hardly in the game, ask any lobbyist. Also very early in the book you will learn that corn based ethanol produced to reduce our use of gasoline has succeeded in increasing our food prices when sugar based ethanol production would produce much cheaper ethanol even if the supply is augmented by sugar based ethanol imported from Brazil. Instead a substantial import duty is placed on Brazilian ethanol. Perhaps it’s the way I think, but I attribute those results to the relative strength of the Mid-West corn lobby and a federal government that responds to the biggest paying lobbyist.My solution is to suggest that everyone read this book and that they get after their elected officials to further the interests of us all, rather than the interests of the lobbyists that fund them. That is part of the revolution that is needed.

⭐This book should be an embarrassment to Harvard and their press, not to mention the esteemed professor who penned this beauty. Reads like a grade school reader on energy technologies not the promising breakthrough suggested on the cover and inside flap. It is full of useless information (2005 energy data) and mistakes. Example page 185: “Fluorescent lights and LED lights, because they are hot, do not emit light and are more efficient” Pardon? LED lights are efficient because more of their energy goes into producing light instead of heat. It reviews some old archaic technologies ad nauseam such as the science behind fluorescent lighting. Siting Wikipedia, a two page index and no list of references should all be flags to serious readers. Feels like it was whipped together to fill the vacuum in the important and starved energy space. On a positive note the paper in lovely and many of the colour diagrams are great. I think they printed a conceptual draft by accident…. Harvard shame on you!

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