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This book dispels common myths about electricity and electricity policy and reveals how government policies manipulate energy markets, create hidden costs, and may inflict a net harm on the American people and the environment. Climate change, energy generation and use, and environmental degradation are among the most salient—and controversial—political issues today. Our country's energy future will be determined by the policymakers who enact laws that favor certain kinds of energy production while discouraging others as much as by the energy-production companies or the scientists working to reduce the environmental impact of all energy production. The Reality of American Energy: The Hidden Costs of Electricity provides rare insights into the politics and economics surrounding electricity in the United States. It identifies the economic, physical, and environmental implications of distorting energy markets to limit the use of fossil fuels while increasing renewable energy production and explains how these unseen effects of favoring renewable energy may be counterproductive to the economic interests of American citizens and to the protection of the environment. The first two chapters of the book introduce the subject of electricity policy in the United States and to enable readers to understand why policymakers do what they do. The remainder of the book examines the realities of the major electricity sources in the United States: coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydrodynamic, wind, biomass, solar, and geothermal. Each of these types of energy sources is analyzed in a dedicated chapter that explains how the electricity source works and identifies how politics and public policy shape the economic and environmental impacts associated with them.
Meet Michael Skelly, the man boldly harnessing wind energy that could power America’s future and break its fossil fuel dependence in this “essential, compelling look into the future of the nation’s power grid” (Bryan Burrough, author of The Big Rich). The United States is in the midst of an energy transition. We have fallen out of love with dirty fossil fuels and want to embrace renewable energy sources like wind and solar. A transition from a North American power grid that is powered mostly by fossil fuels to one that is predominantly clean is feasible, but it would require a massive building spree—wind turbines, solar panels, wires, and billions of dollars would be needed. Enter Michael Skelly, an infrastructure builder who began working on wind energy in 2000 when many considered the industry a joke. Eight years later, Skelly helped build the second largest wind power company in the United States—and sold it for $2 billion. Wind energy was no longer funny—it was well on its way to powering more than 6% of electricity in the United States. Award-winning journalist, Russel Gold tells Skelly’s story, which in many ways is the story of our nation’s evolving relationship with renewable energy. Gold illustrates how Skelly’s company, Clean Line Energy, conceived the idea for a new power grid that would allow sunlight where abundant to light up homes in the cloudy states thousands of miles away, and take wind from the Great Plains to keep air conditioners running in Atlanta. Thrilling, provocative, and important, Superpower is a fascinating look at America’s future.
Reducing and managing humanity's demand for energy is a fundamental part of the effort to mitigate climate change. In this, the most comprehensive textbook ever written on the subject, L.D. Danny Harvey lays out the theory and practice of how things must change if we are to meet our energy needs sustainably. The book begins with a succinct summary of the scientific basis for concern over global warming, then outlines energy basics and current patterns and trends in energy use. This is followed by a discussion of current and advanced technologies for the generation of electricity from fossil fuels. The book then considers in detail how energy is used, and how this use can be dramatically reduced, in the following end-use sectors: - buildings - transportation - industry - food and agriculture - municipal services The findings from these sector-by-sector assessments are then applied to generate scenarios of how global energy demand could evolve over the coming decades with full implementation of the identified and economically-feasible energy-saving potential. The book ends with a brief discussion of policies that can be used to reduce energy demand, but also addresses the limits of technologically-based improvements in efficiency in moderating demand and of the need to re-think some of our underlying assumptions concern ends with a brief discusing what we really need. Along with its companion volume on C-free energy supply, and accompanied by extensive supplementary online material, this is an essential resource for students and practitioners in engineering, architecture, environment and energy related fields. Online material includes: Excel-based computational exercises, teaching slides for each chapter, links to free software tools.
Imagine fuel without fear. No climate change. No oil spills, no dead coalminers, no dirty air, no devastated lands, no lost wildlife. No energy poverty. No oil-fed wars, tyrannies, or terrorists. No leaking nuclear wastes or spreading nuclear weapons. Nothing to run out. Nothing to cut off. Nothing to worry about. Just energy abundance, benign and affordable, for all, forever. That richer, fairer, cooler, safer world is possible, practical, even profitable-because saving and replacing fossil fuels now works better and costs no more than buying and burning them. Reinventing Fire shows how business-motivated by profit, supported by civil society, sped by smart policy-can get the US completely off oil and coal by 2050, and later beyond natural gas as well. Authored by a world leader on energy and innovation, the book maps a robust path for integrating real, here-and-now, comprehensive energy solutions in four industries-transportation, buildings, electricity, and manufacturing-melding radically efficient energy use with reliable, secure, renewable energy supplies.Popular in tone and rooted in applied hope, Reinventing Fire shows how smart businesses are creating a potent, global, market-driven, and explosively growing movement to defossilize fuels. It points readers to trillions in savings over the next 40 years, and trillions more in new business opportunities.Whether you care most about national security, or jobs and competitive advantage, or climate and environment, this major contribution by world leaders in energy innovation offers startling innovations will support your values, inspire your support, and transform your sense of possibility.Pragmatic citizens today are more interested in outcomes than motives. Reinventing Fire answers this trans-ideological call. Whether you care most about national security, or jobs and competitive advantage, or climate and environment, its startling innovations will support your values, inspire your support, and transform your sense of possibility.
This concise, accessible introduction to the history of oil tells the story of how petroleum has shaped human life since it was first discovered oozing inconspicuously from the soil. For a century, human dependence on petroleum caused little discomfort as we enjoyed the heyday of cheap crude—a glorious episode of energy gluttony that was destined to end. Today, we see the disastrous results in environmental degradation, political instability, and world economic disparity in the waning years of a petroleum-powered civilization—lessons rooted in the finite nature of oil. Considering the nature of oil itself as well as humans’ remarkable relationship with it, Brian C. Black spotlights our modern conundrum and then explores the challenges of our future without oil. It is this essential context, he argues, that will prepare us for our energy transition. Bringing his global perspective and wide-ranging technical knowledge, Black has written an essential contribution to environmental history and the rapidly emerging field of energy history in this sweeping, forward-looking survey.
In this book the authors make the case for renewable energy and renewable energy policy. Each chapter begins with an inspiring story by someone working in renewable energy or a related field.
"Argues that obtaining energy through the hydraulic fracturing of shale rock is based on unstable economic foundations, and is having much more destructive effects on the economy and the government of the United States than its advocates claim"--
There are rapid, and sometimes radical, changes now transforming energy production and consumption in the United States. Utilizing contemporary examples throughout his narrative, Walter A. Rosenbaum captures this transformation in American Energy: The Politics of 21st Century Policy while analyzing how important actors, institutions, and issues impact American energy policymaking. With clear explanations of relevant energy technologies—from controversial fracking to mountain top mining to nuclear waste storage—the book first looks at the policy options available in governing the energy economy and then discusses specific resources (petroleum and natural gas, coal, nuclear power, electricity, renewable energy, conservation) and the global energy challenges associated with climate change. This is a perfect supplement for any environmental politics course.
This historical investigation focuses exclusively on American energy policy in the 1970s. Revisiting the last time energy issues came to the forefront of national political discourse, the essays collected here provide new insight into the energy crisis of that decade—insights with clear implications for our present dilemmas.