The Best 21st-century Energy Book EVER (yet).
The doodle of a physicist (regarding the energy problem, a physicist’s doodle is better than a layman’s in depth analysis) trying to find the maximums and minimums of possibilities in a problem. The problem is Sustainable Energy. The book is full of bad news, given our huge energy consumption.
To sum up, it will be very difficult to cover even half with renewables. We consume thousands of years worth of prehistoric bio-fuel every year. With modern bio-fuel, we are limited to burning one year’s worth in one year. Solar, wind, and tide offer somewhat better return (per acre, per everything), but still not enough to match our consumption. We may have to cover the deficit with nuclear until fusion is (maybe) cracked, or we learn to live with less.
The intermittency of most renewables is also tackled. Coal and natural gas are both able to exactly match demand. The numbers tell us that wind, the present renewable workhorse, is irregular, even though the wind is always blowing somewhere. (A familiar idea to physicists who send huge reams of data over the internet—even internet traffic, taken as a whole, has a wide range between lulls and spurts. The internet only works because with networks it is relatively inexpensive to build in huge overcapacity.)
It’s still in beta, but it’s already a massive tour-de-force of hard renewable energy data and analysis.
If you read this, you will be energy-crisis smart. Or, smarter than almost everybody else presently is.