Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future [Hardcover]

Robert Bryce (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2010

The promise of “green jobs” and a “clean energy future” has roused the masses. But as Robert Bryce makes clear in this provocative book, that vision needs a major re-vision. We cannot—and will not—quit using carbon-based fuels at any time in the near future for a simple reason: they provide the horsepower that we crave. The hard reality is that oil, coal, and natural gas are here to stay.

Fueling our society requires more than sentiment and rhetoric; we need to make good decisions and smart investments based on facts. In Power Hungry, Bryce provides a supertanker-load of footnoted facts while shepherding readers through basic physics and math. And with the help of a panoply of vivid graphics and tables, he crushes a phalanx of energy myths, showing why renewables are not green, carbon capture and sequestration won’t work, and even—surprise!—that the U.S. is leading the world in energy efficiency. He also charts the amazing growth of the fuels of the future: natural gas and nuclear.

Power Hungry delivers a clear-eyed view of what America has “in the tank,” and what’s needed to transform the gargantuan global energy sector.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Journalist Bryce, author of Gusher of Lies and managing editor of online industry newsmagazine Energy Tribune, is nothing if not polemical. While his swings are sometimes familiar ("The essence of protecting the environment can be distilled to a single phrase: Small is beautiful") and sometimes bizarre ("The world isn't using too much oil. It's not using enough"), the points he raises merit serious consideration. In this informed, opinionated state-of-the-industry overview, Bryce contends that energy policy must be based upon four imperatives: "power density, energy density, cost and scale." Wind and solar power, he says, fail those standards due to storage problems and the vagaries of weather; Denmark, the poster child for renewable energy, nevertheless imports hydroelectric power from Norway and Sweden, relies heavily upon North Sea oil and coal, and increased its greenhouse gas emissions by 2.1 percent between 1990 and 2006. Pointing to the environmental cost of hydropower ("ruining habitats for aquatic life"), oil spills, and coal mining, Bryce makes a strong case for heavier reliance upon natural gas, a relatively clean and readily available carbon fuel, as a bridge technology: "The smartest, most forward-looking U.S. energy policy can be summed up in one acronym: 'N2N'," for "natural gas to nuclear power."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Kirkus
“Capably argued… advocates of renewable energy should familiarize themselves with the book, since oil, gas and coal lobbyists surely will.”

Philadelphia Inquirer
“Bryce is especially good at explaining why fossil fuels have become entrenched as our main energy sources.” 

Library Journal
“Bryce uses copious facts and research to make a compelling case that renewable sources have their place in our energy future but they aren't the viable panacea we're led to believe.”

Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, April 23, 2010
“Any new Robert Bryce book, in my opinion, had one tough hurdle to clear: I’d found Bryce’s first book, Gusher of Lies, impossible to put down.”

American Spectator, April 26, 2010
“Endlessly fascinating reading.”

Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2010
“A brutal brilliant exploration… If Power Hungry sounds like a supercharged polemic, its shocks are delivered with forensic skill and narrative aplomb…. It is unsentimental, unsparing and impassioned; and, if you’ll excuse the pun, it is precisely the kind of journalism we need to hold truth to power.”

Washington Times, May 31, 2010
“[Bryce’s] magnificently unfashionable, superlatively researched new book dares to fly in the face of all current conventional wisdom and cant…. I have never yet found any book or author who does a more thorough, unanswerable job of demolishing universally held environmental myths than Mr. Bryce does…. Mr. Obama is reputed to be an omnivorous reader of serious intellectual volumes. He should drop everything else and put Robert Bryce’s invaluable book at the top of his list. So should every senator and Congress member and every self-important, scientifically illiterate pundit in America, right and left alike. They will all learn a lot.”

 

National Review, August 2, 2010

“Should be mandatory reading for U.S. policymakers.”

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs (April 27, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586487892
• ISBN-13: 978-1586487898
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.3 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (71 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #282,819 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

236 of 255 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Nutrition Action for Energy Appetites April 16, 2010

By Jon Boone

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

With Power Hungry, energy journalist and Austin apiarist Robert Bryce marshals lots of accurate numbers in context to make plain how modern culture exacts power from energy to save time, increase wealth, and raise standards of living. He also dispenses common sense to citizens and policy makers for an improved environment, a better, more productive economy, and more enlightened civil society. Inspired by the environmental economics of Rockefeller University's Jesse Ausubel and the University of Manitoba's prolific Vaclav Smil, he makes the case for continuing down the path of de-carbonizing our machine fuels--a process begun two hundred years ago when we turned from wood to fossil fuels and huge reservoirs of impounded water. As the world's population continues to urbanize, people will inevitably demand cleaner, healthier, environmentally sensitive energy choices.

Today, the world uses hydrocarbons for 90 percent of its energy, getting a lot of bang for its buck. Bryce offers convincing evidence that, over the next several generations, particularly since broad energy transformations require much time and financial investment, relatively cleaner burning natural gas will provide a bridge to pervasive use of nuclear power--" the only always-on, no-carbon source than can replace significant amounts of coal in our electricity generation portfolio." And if nuclear ultimately becomes the centerpiece for the electricity sector, which constitutes about 40 percent of our total energy use, this development would accelerate the de-carbonization of the transportation and heating sectors as well.

His narrative transcends the current climate change debate.... He thinks the evidence on either side is equivocal, at best provisional, and, even if it could be proven conclusively that humans were responsible for precipitously warming the earth by producing a surfeit of carbon dioxide, there is little that could be done about the situation now that would be consequential or practical, except embrace imaginative adaptation approaches.

Bryce organizes his ideas around four interrelated "Imperatives" that serve as a prime motif for human history and explain much contemporary circumstance: power density, energy density, scale and cost. He shows that, although energy is the ability to do work, what people really crave is the ability to control the rate at which work gets done--power. Performing work faster means more time to do something else. This begets an appetitive feedback loop, where more power unleashes more time to produce more power. As the scale of this process increases, costs are reduced, making what power creates more affordable.

In terms of economic efficiency and improved ecosystems, producing the most power in the smallest space at a scale affordable by all is what present and future enterprise should ensure.

The power density of fossil fuels, expressed in watts, BTUs, or horsepower, has been the lynchpin of our modernity, although they will eventually become depleted, perhaps over a few centuries or much sooner, as various peak oil and coal scenarios suggest. (Bryce shows that worldwide oil's marketshare has fallen over the last 35 years and the rate of decline will likely continue.) And they do have negative environmental consequences. Particularly coal, with such environmentally treacherous extraction techniques as strip mining/mountaintop removal, and toxic emissions. But their overall benefits at present outweigh the negatives in a comprehensive cost benefit analysis. Which is why they're so popular.

Hydrocarbons lift people out of poverty, literally empowering them to better health, wealth, and productivity. "The key attribute of hydrocarbons is their reliability," a precondition for coordinated economic and social convergence, which is the very hallmark of modern life. Planning to replace their capacity successfully will demand great ingenuity and the most advanced technology--not hyped-up premodern gadgetry like industrial wind technology.

Over the first seven chapters of his book, Bryce lays out the gargantuan scale of our energy consumption, bound on the one side by the existence of nearly seven billion people and the thirst for increasingly denser power supplies on the other. He shows why, if oil didn't exist, we'd have to invent it. Deploying helpful charts and graphs throughout, he demonstrates that we will not, indeed cannot, quit using hydrocarbons any time soon, since our daily consumption is equivalent to 226 million barrels of oil, equal to the total daily output of twenty-seven Saudi Arabias.

The world consumes nearly 7 billion horsepower a day, albeit unevenly, since Americans consume energy at 18 times the rate of people in Pakistan and India. America leads the world in reliable horsepower and produces about 74 percent of the primary energy it consumes. Moreover, it has more hydrocarbon reserves than any other nation. Yet, despite all this power, the United States leads the world in energy efficiency and per capital carbon emission reductions over the last fifteen years.

So why are so many willing to trade the high power density of coal, natural gas, and oil for such unreliable, low-power-density sources as wind and solar? Part II, The Myths of Green Energy, attempts to answer this question. Bryce looks closely at the claims for wind especially and debunks them all as mainly the result of snake oil, a too-gullible public suffused in scientific illiteracy, "happy talk" from media (viz, Thomas Friedman), and self serving bombast from industry pundits like T. Boone Pickens. Thinking that wind technology, for example, could put a dent in the use of fossil fuels as an "alternate" energy source is just plain goofy, akin to believing that a book of matches could melt a glacier. Believing that corn and cellulosic ethanol are friends of the environment and consumers is downright Orwellian. In truth, they reduce efficiency and performance while damaging machine engines, and raise the cost of food by shrinking food supply while depleting millions of acres of soil and siphoning off a sea of water. For shame.

Bryce reinforces the theme of his previous book, Gusher of Lies. The energy business is so vast and intricately global that it dooms any nation's quest for energy independence. Those who think more hybrid cars, wind machines, and solar cells will free the United States from its dependence on imports will be shocked to discover that those technologies hinge on rare earth elements obtainable almost exclusively in China. Which fact largely explains why the Chinese are rapidly becoming a dominant manufacturer and exporter of "green" technologies.

Bryce relishes challenging flimflam. Power Hungry demolishes the notion that oil is dirty; that carbon capture/sequestration schemes can be globally effective; that cap-and-trade/taxation/renewable energy credit ideas for reducing carbon dioxide emissions can do anything but worsen the situation, at the expense of tax and ratepayers; that plug-in electric cars will soon revolutionize the transportation sector; and that efficiency, desirable as it is as a means of conservation, can change the world.

Bryce's conclusions about better policy follow the logic of Sherlock Holmes: "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." By eliminating the imposters and exposing the disingenuous, he is then able to engage in rational discourse about the genuinely probable technologies that will in future slake our ginormous craving for power.

He states the problem in a way that suggests solutions. If society seeks cleaner air and water, if consumers seek cheaper energy, if environmentalists seek open vistas and large swaths of untrammeled nature, if politicians seek a significant reduction of greenhouse gasses while maintaining, even expanding, the power requirements of modernity--then the future of energy conversion for electricity must hinge on increased use of natural gas in the near term while the world prepares for nuclear power over the long haul. Given the magnitude of the situation, anything else is hope. And prayer.

Recounting the sorry recent history of natural gas supply, Bryce explains how pandering politics and the coal industry combined to reduce its availability, making the public think the resource had been exhausted, However, new discoveries of extensive shale deposits in the United States, along with improvements in extraction technologies, now make natural gas much more available. That it burns 50 percent cleaner than coal, emits no toxic particulates, and is so versatile, make it the ideal transitional fossil fuel for the next generation or so. As more supplies become available, costs will continue to drop, making natural gas more appealing to consumers. To protect against damaging the ground water and pollutant leakage through gas lines, the industry would have to be carefully regulated, particularly in remote areas during the extraction process.

Still, as good as they are, carbon-based fuels, even those as beneficial as oil and natural gas, continue to put us at odds with our potential for informed stewardship of the planet. Our best scientists tell us we must do better in achieving goals of sustainable biodiversity and healthier ecosystems. To do so, we should sooner than later move beyond sloganeering and heavy reliance on fossil fuels.

As Bryce says, "nuclear goes beyond green." It provides two million times the power density of fossil fuels and can be contained in a small area, preserving the countryside. Concerns about its safety because of exaggerated news accounts of the damage inflicted by the Three Mile Island/Chernobyl accidents, along with the dramaturgy wrought by Hollywood, have allowed fear mongering to prevail over sound science. Despite not building a single nuclear plant in thirty years, the US still has more nuclear facilities than any nation in the world. US nuclear plants have a capacity factor of 92 percent, significantly better than any other generating system. Even though nuclear has only 11percent of the nation's installed capacity, it nonetheless satisfies 20 percent of demand. The nation's largest grid, the PJM, uses nuclear for 35 percent of its generation, and has done so safely for over twenty years.

For the last thirty years, France has employed nuclear for 80 percent of its electricity consumption. The French reprocess most of the spent fuel, capturing the uranium and other materials so that they can be sent through the reactors again, reducing "the volume of waste by a factor of two or three." Moreover, Bryce highlights the prospects for a fusion-fission transmutation system in the near future that would create additional fuel for electricity and medical applications. It would also substantially reduce radioactive half-life time--while preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The potential for newer, smaller, safer nuclear power plants is enormous, and Power Hungry explores a range of what is probable. Today, the capital costs of large nuclear plants are very high, but they can run continuously without interruption day and night year after year. Their long-term maintenance costs are relatively low. Compared with building a large hydro dam, however, which has enormous negative environmental consequences for entire watersheds, construction costs for nuclear are a bargain. Contrasted with the incredibly high capital costs of wind projects, which provide only sporadic energy and no modern power performance, nuclear is incomparable, for there is no apples-to-apples comparison to be made with wind. How can one compare the best performing car ever made with a clunker that never works as desired?

Bryce brings his narrative sweep to a conclusion by calling for rethinking what the notion of green should mean. In particular, he urges that environmentalism return to the days when those commanding the movement revered hard facts, treasured good science, and understood that culture was part of nature, not mystically outside of it. They knew the "hard truth" that "energy production is not pretty, cheap, or easy." Although they may have been initially seduced by the allure of "renewable energy," they would have finally understood that the whole concept of renewables is problematic, since nothing is continually renewable; they only appear that way from the short perspective of human time. As many have discovered about the only widely effective renewable, impounded hydro, simply because a source of power is clean-burning does not make it "green." Informed environmentalists should know that the current push for wind technology is based on the mistaken belief that wind is greener than hydrocarbons such as oil and natural gas.

Power Hungry also urges renewed support for the International Atomic Energy Agency; putting the skids on the ethanol boondoggle by short-circuiting Iowa's stranglehold on presidential primaries; pushing for greater scientific/engineering literacy and less political grandstanding in public policy; banning mountaintop removal coal extraction techniques; and imposing coordinated reality on national energy policy. The policy goal should be to promote "cheap abundant energy" consistent with the protection of sensitive habitat, vulnerable species of flora and fauna, and a more diverse and empowered planet.

The book covers so much ground across so many topics that it is unfair to quibble about details that are not fully accounted for. Bryce gets the important ideas right. He spends much time trimming the sails of the industrial wind fandango, in part because he knows it is inconsequential as an energy source but also because public dollars invested in it represent dollars not spent on effective power. He couldn't find a shred of empirical evidence that wind has been responsible for offsetting greenhouse gas emissions in the production of electricity--or that it has contributed to any reductions in fossil fuel use. Even in the wind poster nation of Denmark. Instead, he found only "projections" offered up by industry trade organizations or government agencies beholden to wind success that were uncontaminated by reality--much like college football polls.

Most importantly, he tells why wind can't offset meaningful CO2 emissions or replace fossil fuels. To do this, he introduces the work of engineers like Australian Peter Lang, Canadian Kent Hawkins, and Britain's Jim Oswald, who demonstrate how wind's existential volatility and unreliability must make everyone and everything involved with wind integration work much harder just to stand still, in the process greatly increasing both cost and thermal activity. Wind is a fuel supplement that requires a lot of supplementation, since no one can be sure how much of its capacity will be available for any future time. A wind plant's output unpredictably bounces around between zero and its maximum possible yield.

The challenge is how to reconcile the square peg of firm reliability with the round hole of wind's fluttering caprice. Since it must match supply perfectly with demand at all times, no grid can allow wind volatility to be loosed by itself: It must be entangled with proactive, highly dynamic conventional generation to make its capacity whole. More than 70 percent of any wind project's maximum capability must come from reliable, flexible conventional generation, typically natural gas units working inefficiently to do so. These inefficiencies accumulate quickly, eventually consuming more fuel in the same way that an automobile does in stop-and-go traffic.

As Lang shows, even the best possible thermal entanglement with wind, comprised of several types of natural gas systems, can save only 15 percent more CO2 than can be achieved with the natural gas systems alone, without any wind. Inefficient use of natural gas systems with wind, such as responsive open cycle units normally used only at peak demand, would save no net carbon dioxide emissions. As Hawkins shows, using a combination of coal and natural gas for wind balancing results in more carbon emissions than would be the case without any wind. Any fossil fuel saved when it is sporadically displaced by wind is often consumed in even greater volume as it is called upon to compensate for wind's relentless skittering.

More than 2500 skyscraper-sized wind turbines, spread over 500 miles of terrain, and a passel of natural gas units at 90 percent of wind's maximum output--and hundreds of miles of new transmission lines/voltage regulation--would be required to provide parity with the capacity of a 1500MW nuclear facility.

Bruce makes vividly clear that wind is neither clean nor green--and is in the hunt solely because of massive government support, which is 23 times the per kilowatt-hour subsidy given for fossil-fired plants that produce copious reliable capacity. It provides only sporadic energy--not modern power performance. Wind is not only inimical to all the primary goals of modern electricity production--reliability, affordability, security; it also actively subverts them. It is not cutting edge, effective, and progressive; rather, it is antediluvian, dysfunctional, and uncivil.

In many ways, wind resembles the character Major Major Major Major, made so indelible by Joseph Heller in his immortal Catch-22. Like wind, even when the Major was in, he was out. Even more apropos is the connection with Major Major's father, a Calvinist alfalfa farmer who received a public subsidy for every acre of crop he did not grow, using the money to buy more land on which not to grow alfalfa. He thought such practice was divinely ordained, proclaiming, "You reap what you sow," while maintaining that federal aid to anyone but farmers was "creeping socialism." With only a few word changes, this is the line trumpeted by the American Wind Energy Association on behalf of its limited liability companies.

Spawned, then supported, by government welfare measures at considerable public expense, wind produces no meaningful product or service yet provides enormous profit to a few wealthy investors, primarily multinational energy companies in search of increased bottom lines through tax avoidance. Wind does reap what it sows, masquerading as a power source to hide its real identity as an Enronesque tax shelter generator.

Power Hungry sets the stage for an inquiry about why wind has become so politically attractive. Gullibility and dimwittery are surely part of the explanation, as Bryce suggests. But the real causes may have more to do with the nefarious acquiescence of our regulatory and government agencies--combined with how the power industry itself has embraced wind. Why aren't utilities in general, and regulatory agencies and grid controllers in particular, being held accountable for what they're doing to ratepayers by supporting generation that must destabilize the electricity supply/transmission system? To what extent are corporations that are heavily involved with coal, natural gas, and oil also involved with wind? The bipartisan dive to the bottom now enabling the wind scam is worthy of another book.

As it is, Power Hungry provides a grand tour of our energy landscape in the best journalistic tradition of serving the public good, exposing the cant of received wisdom and using the authority and weight of good numbers to put ideas into proper perspective. Bryce's numbers provide giant shoulders upon which to stand, allowing us to see farther and better, increasing our knowledge and improving the odds for institutional wisdom. There are few things more important to the world's life, liberty, and happiness than an enhanced ability to convert abundant energy into high power at affordable cost. Robert Bryce, with buoyant bonhomie, marks the way. Read more ›

99 of 123 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Going, Going, Gone. Another Home Run for Bryce April 27, 2010

By Kenneth J. Malloy

Format:Kindle Edition

You just have to feel sorry for the advocates of global warming. They've had a bad year. First it was the continuation of a decade of stable or slightly cooling weather, completely unpredicted by the climate models. Then it was the devastating scandals, not only in the Climate Research Unit but in NASA and the IPCC as well. To add insult to injury, there was the jarring failure of Copenhagen. Then the failure of Congress to adopt a cap and trade scheme when they had a Democratic President and overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. Now the coup de grâce, Robert Bryce hits yet another home run by completely demolishing the argument for renewables in his new book Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.

Bryce is really pissing me off. I am an energy policy expert. His earlier book Gusher of Lies was an excellent rebuttal to the demagoguery on oil imports. But oil wasn't my thing so I gave him a pass and enthusiastically supported his book. But now he writes Power Hungry about the idiocy of many of the arguments supporting "green energy." This is my field and so I am truly in awe of his ability to so cogently skewer mindless advocates of green.

Bryce is addicted to numbers. He is ruthless in presenting numbers that make his points. His main weapon is the tyranny of big numbers. Many ideas sound good in the abstract--e.g., wind power, electric cars, cellulosic ethanol--but fail miserably when put into the context of US energy demographics.

I marvel that Bryce could deliver a nugget of new insight on literally every page. (I realize I am leaving myself open to abuse.) But he does.... The list would be too long of all the fascinating nuggets that Bryce has so artfully strung together in an altogether gripping story of our modern day energy dilemma. A few will suffice to make the point:
* He presents the Four Imperatives of energy supply: power density, energy density, cost, and scale;
* He describes the technology advances that allow us to access huge natural gas shale resources;
* He discusses modular nuclear units (some as small as 25 megawatts);
* He absolutely skewers T. Boone Pickens and Amory Lovins;
* He devastates the argument that Denmark is an exemplar for relying on renewable energy; and
* He catalogues China's dominance in the "natural earth" resources essential for wind and solar.
It goes on and on.

Given all the attention given to literature that paints false pictures of green energy, I hope Bryce's book takes off like a rocket. The country very much needs this splash of cold water on the phony claims made for green energy. Read more ›

31 of 40 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A Valuable Source of In-Depth Energy Information September 21, 2010

By Jay Lehr

Format:Hardcover

Few science books are worth reading each and every page. Climatism, by Steve Gorham (reviewed here in March), is an exception. Power Hungry is not, but without doubt it contains more than enough great information to make it a terrific buy for anyone with a strong interest in the nation's energy supply.

I recommend reading only about 20 pages a day, as it is very heavy on the numbers, but it's well worth a fun 15-day investment.

Comprehensive Research
Robert Bryce spent four years researching every aspect of American energy from a fairly objective point of view. As one currently under contract to compile a four-volume encyclopedia of energy for John Wiley & Sons, I can tell you Bryce has done an outstanding job.

From time to time he throws in his personal politics--which too many authors are inclined to do--and he has too much respect for the global warming alarmists for my comfort, but these do not detract too much from the excellent analysis of various energy technologies.

A full 54 pages devoted to references illustrate the comprehensive research Bryce has done, as well as the quality of his sources. He is at his best destroying many of the myths regarding renewable energy, providing powerful mathematical proofs that anyone can understand.

He is also excellent on nuclear energy, and I will use one of his chapters as the basis for a future article on small-scale nuclear power generation in a future issue of Environment & Climate News....

Useful Information
To convince you of the value of the book, in the remainder of this review I will simply offer a surfer's list of some of the wonderful nuggets of information this 394-page text contains:

* Natural gas supplies are bountiful, with a known 280 years of resources available at our present rate of consumption.

* The next time someone says we are addicted to oil, substitute the word "prosperity" for oil.

* Nearly 3 billion people relying on biomass energy would love to trade places with us.

* Power density is the key to all energy sources. Oil, gas, coal, and nuclear have high power density, whereas wind, solar, and other renewable power sources have terribly low density.

* Humans cannot live near wind farms because of the low-level noise produced by their massive blades, which has palpable physical impacts.

* Each megawatt of deliverable wind energy requires 870 cubic meters of concrete and 460 tons of steel, whereas a gas-fired plant requires only about 3 percent as much.

* In order for the Chinese to build a planned 12,700 megawatts of new wind power, they will have to add 9,200 megawatts of new coal power as back-up.

* Denmark's perceived leadership in successful wind power is a mirage. Denmark has not reduced carbon emissions, energy costs have tripled there, and the nation must export most of its wind power at below-market rates.

* The American Bird Conservancy estimates between 75,000 and 275,000 birds are killed each year by wind turbines.

* The United States, without strict government mandates, is already leading the world in reducing its carbon intensity and its energy use without doing any of the things environmental activist groups dictate.

* Each year, hundreds of thousands of people die in Third World nations from indoor air pollution caused by the burning of biomass. Power from coal, natural gas, and oil would improve living conditions and reduce pollution-related deaths.

* Although environmental activist groups strongly hype cellulosic ethanol, it is no closer to technological and economic viability than it was when first described in 1921.

* Ethanol cannot significantly reduce the demand for oil, because many products other than automotive fuel are extracted from oil.

* Batteries have improved, but not by the orders of magnitude required to enable battery-powered cars to compete with other forms of transportation.

* 2,000 tons of uranium can release as much energy as 4.2 billion tons of oil.

* Measured in units of output, wind and solar power are getting 15 times as much federal subsidy money as nuclear power.

Power Density the Key
The primary theme of this book is the importance of power density. As Bryce thoroughly documents, coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power provide such power density while wind, solar, and biofuels do not.

You will not find a book on energy that makes this important point more strongly than this one.

Jay Lehr, Ph.D. ([e-mail]) is science director of The Heartland Institute. Read more ›