Review by Geoff Drake
David MacKay, professor of Physics at Cambridge, published this wide-ranging book on Sustainable Energy In 2008. It is a remarkable book for its clarity and objectivity and is available on line. It can be downloaded as a 10 page synopsis, individual chapters, or the whole book, all free of charge.
On his appointment as Chief Scientific Advisor to The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) in 2009 he said “Climate change and secure energy are two of the most urgent issues facing the UK and the global community. The solutions must be rooted firmly in the science and I look forward to advising the Government on how it can help deliver these important goals.”
The first 20 pages or so of his book cover the evidence for global warming from the build-up of carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect. The approach adopted sets the tone of the whole book; an interesting commentary backed up by huge amounts of carefully referenced data, all beautifully and concisely presented on graphs and bar charts, etc.
In the early chapters of the rest of the book, all 340 pages of it, he itemises our consumption of energy in modern living in detail, and examines the sources of renewable energy which are available to us and what quantity we could reasonably achieve from solar energy, wind power, wave power etc. He brings this huge subject down to size by measuring our use and sources of energy in understandable units: kWh per day per person, kWh being the units we pay for on our domestic electricity meters.
There are are technical chapters supporting these early chapters for those want to dig deeper into the various topics.
He concludes that In the UK our current consumption per person is 125 kWh/day and that for any renewable facility to make an appreciable contribution would take an enormous amount of space which he believes people would not accept and pay for and if that were the case current consumption would never be met by British renewables. He then goes on to develop 6 strategies to eliminate the gap between consumption and renewable production, which is where Nuclear energy comes on the scene.
After downloading the synopsis I decided to buy the book- it cost less than £20- and have not regretted it . It is a monumental tome its scope and the amount of information in it is astonishing and I like delving into the detail of subjects I am not so familiar with. It is a comfort to know that such a piece of work has been available at the heart of Government at such a time like now when we are seeing more vividly the effects of global warming.
So what happened to David Mackay when he left the DECC in 2014?
It is a story of triumph and tragedy. He became Regius Professor of Engineering at Cambridge and was Knighted; he was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2015 and died in 2016. He was just 48.