Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air

David MacKay's Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air, as a community edition.

This is not the official edition. MacKay's original book and website are at withouthotair.com. This edition reproduces his 2008 text unchanged, in an open and editable form, so that it can be corrected and updated — collaboratively, in the open. See About this edition.

Table of Contents

Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (2008 Edition)

to those who will not have the benefit of two billion years' accumulated energy reserves

• Preface

Part I: Numbers, not adjectives

• 1 Motivations
• 2 The balance sheet
• 3 Cars
• 4 Wind
• 5 Planes
• 6 Solar
• 7 Heating and cooling
• 8 Hydroelectricity
• 9 Light
• 10 Offshore wind
• 11 Gadgets
• 12 Wave
• 13 Food and farming
• 14 Tide
• 15 Stuff
• 16 Geothermal
• 17 Public services
• 18 Can we live on renewables?

Part II: Making a difference

• 19 Every BIG helps
• 20 Better transport
• 21 Smarter heating
• 22 Efficient electricity use
• 23 Sustainable fossil fuels?
• 24 Nuclear?
• 25 Living on other countries’ renewables?
• 26 Fluctuations and storage
• 27 Five energy plans for Britain
• 28 Putting costs in perspective
• 29 What to do now
• 30 Energy plans for Europe, America, and the World
• 31 The last thing we should talk about
• 32 Saying yes

Part III: Technical chapters

• A Cars II
• B Wind II
• C Planes II
• D Solar II
• E Heating II
• F Waves II
• G Tide II
• H Stuff II
• Part IV  Useful data
• I Quick reference
• J Populations and areas
• K UK energy history

Backmatter

• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• About the author
• Charts

Why this project

MacKay died in 2016, so the book will not be revised by him. It remains a go-to reference, but its numbers have dated and its original format is not easy to edit or collaborate on. So we converted it to markdown, put it in a public repository, and archived the original — which makes a collaborative revised edition possible.

Full reasoning, what we have deliberately not changed, and how to help: About this edition.

Contribute

• Suggest or make an edit: Open an issue or edit the text directly (coming soon)
• Make this site better / prettier etc: fork and pull on the repo or get in touch

Full source plus README plus more in the the open github repository here: https://github.com/life-itself/without-hot-air

License

Original text is copyright Professor David JC MacKay FRS (Professor of Natural Philosophy, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge) and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence. See http://withouthotair.com/about.html

This is a free book. 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 to any of the electronic versions on this website. There's pdf and html versions (thanks to William Sigmund!); we are working on other formats.

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.

Additions and modifications by other authors are dual-licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License v4 (unported) and Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike 2.0 UK (as required by the Share-Alike license).