Energy: A Beginner's Guide

Very informative book. However I'm left wondering the actual energy cost to build and maintain and strategies to dispose of all these alternative resources. I am always looking for more information on that. I felt the book touches it but does not supply a satisfactory answer. That makes me more curious to find out more. I have read many of his books and they are all substantial and well substantiated, and complementary in many aspects. I trust Vaclav immensely and hope he can delve more into those aspects on one of his new books.

The writing was straight forward and the historical overview of energy sources was interesting. The evaluation of future energy sources is limited to current knowledge as it only can be. However what was not addressed was the impact on demand for natural resources required by developing technologies. Such as, the quantities of steel, concrete, copper, rare earths, lithium and others. I believe limits on key natural resources will be the limiting factor on any of the developing energy technologies.

This is my first book by Vaclav Smil. I had heard great things about him, and I was not disappointed. The book is a very detailed short introduction to the topic of energy. My only complaint is that the book is a little dry. Apart from that it is very much worth your time.

This is a very interesting book, but most of all a comprehensive review of renewables. Interesting all of the hard fact information that it contains. Highly recommended, fascinating.

I do not normally read this type of book. For that reason I followed A Year of Books . I did read learning books that I normally do not read. This book was rather interesting. It was all about energy.

I picked up Vaclav Smil's Energy because I wanted to better understand mankind's current use of energy, and to develop a better perspective on how I personally consume energy. The book was perfect for both of these purposes. At ~200 pages, I figured the book would provide a quick survey of many topics at a high level, and wouldn't read like a science textbook. This is true, but someone looking for an overview should know that this book is packed with detailed explanations of the topics that are covered. As a non-scientist, this book increased my knowledge and certainly shed light on the applications to modern life that I was looking for. I highly recommend this book.

This is not truly a Beginner's Guide. The book is more like an Executive Summary of the many writings by the prolific author, up to 2005. No references are given. There is no appendix with useful tables of values. However, there are many useful tables, lists and values dispersed throughout the book. The book has a few flubs: confusing ultra-violet radiation with infrared, missing a "per year" in a sentence, and draft animals pulling with kg of force. Some more serious problems occur on page 152, where the parenthetical definition of "net energy ratio" is actually the the definition of EROI, energy return on investment (of energy). The numbers discussed in the remainder of the paragraph are actually values of 1- 1/EROI . A true beginner would be flummoxed. Another grievance is that the difference between installed capacity of wind power and the actual production of electrical power is not emphasized forcefully enough. A wind production number is given on page 169 (as a percent of world electrical power), but you are on your own to figure out the important capacity factor, and then to put wind power in a fair comparison with nuclear power and coal power. The summary of wind energy is otherwise excellent, as is the summary of photosynthesis and biofuels. All ethanol fans should read it. The focus of the book in not renewable energy policy. The scope is much more grand, all done wonderfully in consistent S.I. Units, with respect for the intelligence of the reader. The author gets to the point. Energetics is the most concise way to organize knowledge of your universe. The brilliant author summarizes nearly all of it in 176 pages: your cells, your home economics, your technology, your planet. For larger scale solar and galactic - you may need to shop elsewhere. Presentation of energetics leads to implications in the sociology of jet travel, urban planning, and history of science and technology. For example, on page 93 we learn how the celebrated inventor James Watt delayed progressive development of the steam engine. The book would be a great investment of time and money if a better book was not available: "Energy in Nature and Society", published by Smil in 2008. That book has more figures, of better quality, appendices and approximately 3 times the amount of text. The overlap in not complete, though. You won't find that tidbit about Watt in the 2008 work, or the fact that swarms of insects soiling the leading edge of wind turbine blades can cause a nearly instant drop in power production by up to 20%.

Based on his previous book about materials, I expected a bit more detailed information about the problems (physical and chemical in addition to beaurocratictic) that are limiting solar cell production, nuclear fusion, wave-kinetic energy harnessing, etc., technologies of the potential future. But there was a M ton of information and I suppose it has "beginner 's guide" on the title, so it is what it is. My favorite part is the in depth analysis of the energy stored in materials and goods, and how they are transferred around the world and reside in everyday as objects. I personally recommend reading the previous materials book which instilled in me an understanding of the physical magnitude of these materials, then this analysis goes more into what it took to make that happen (starting with the sun most of all).