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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Thank you! I'm very happy it pleased you so much :) I second the recommendation of Without Hot Air. It's very unfortunate MacKay won't be able to update it to reflect the developments of the last decade, and the next one.

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I also recommend this book heartily - it's amazing. There have been mutterings about crowdsourcing an update, and I think I saw a github repo once but I can no longer find it. Here's an example:

https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1...

Here's the github repo for "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air: https://github.com/titojankowski/sustainable_energy_without_...

Would love a new commit of some sort :)

For example he says: It’s possible that floating wind turbines may change the economics of deep offshore wind.

They are indeed now being deployed, as are significantly better generators per turbine. His methodology is sound. His specific numbers are going to have to be adjusted. His overall polemic will probably stand (that high energy density sources like nuclear make more sense but are political)

I'm not an expert in the area, so I could be wrong about this, but I think the steam turbine generators needed to get electricity from heat from coal, nuclear, or CSP sources now cost more per nameplate watt than PV—and, in many places, more per delivered watt. This is a result of PV prices falling by more than a factor of ten since MacKay published his book. If this is correct, then high-density energy sources like nuclear power no longer make sense economically, political factors aside. (Wind and hydro excepted, because they don't need steam turbines.)

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