Amazon.com: Power to the People: How the Coming Energy Revolution Will Transform an Industry, Change Our Lives, and Maybe Even Save the Planet (9780374236755): Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran: Books

From Publishers Weekly

In the wake of this summer's failure of the aging power grid, Vaitheeswaran, the author of this timely book, highlights the trends he believes will transform the energy game: liberalization of the energy markets, the increasing influence of the environmental movement and recent innovations in hydrogen fuel-cell technology. In short essays, he covers many of today's energy problems, such as reliance on oil, global warming, air pollution and the dangers inherent in nuclear power. Micropower from fuel cells-big batteries that produce electricity by combining hydrogen fuel and available oxygen-will be our salvation, he asserts, because this technology makes possible small, clean power plants that can be located close to homes and factories, enabling power to flow not from on high but from the grassroots. Vaitheeswaran, an Economist correspondent, profiles some of the energy visionaries he reveres, such as Amory Lovins, a pioneer in the field of micropower, and Firoz Rasul of Ballard Power Systems, a Canadian fuel-cell firm. He also attempts to debunk some of the "truisms" currently spouted on both the left and the right, arguing, for example, that deregulation is not the problem, and that the Kyoto treaty is flawed and would not have solved global warming problems even if the U.S. had signed it. His lucid and entertaining book is informative and insightful, but his prediction that hydrogen fuel-cell technology will take off in a decade or so will strike some as overly optimistic.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Scientific American

Energy is the lifeblood of industrial civilization and an absolutely necessary (albeit certainly not sufficient) condition for lifting the world's poor from their poverty. But current methods of mobilizing civilization's energy are more disruptive of local, regional and global environmental conditions and processes than anything else that humans do. This dichotomy defines the core of the energy challenge in the century before us: How can we supply enough affordable energy to permit the billions who are currently poor (and the billions more who will be added to their numbers in the decades ahead) to attain prosperity--and to sustain and expand the prosperity of those already rich--without suffering intolerable damage to the environmental dimensions of human well-being in industrial and developing countries alike? How difficult will meeting this challenge be? Is the "business as usual" approach--subsidizing fossil-fuel supply and nuclear energy and large hydro projects, maintaining low energy prices to consumers by keeping environmental and political costs "external," propping up oil supply by every available means--part of the solution or part of the problem? Can the privatization of energy sectors in the developing countries and the restructuring and deregulation of energy sectors in industrial countries be accomplished in ways that provide the economic benefits of competition while still preserving essential public benefits such as the reliability and resilience of the electricity system? In his book, Power to the People, Vijay Vaitheeswaran tackles these and the other hard questions at the core of society's energy dilemmas with style, balance and insight. The style is entertaining and accessible. The balance is impeccable--Vaitheeswaran generally lets the most forceful and effective exponents on different sides of the major issues state their case in their own words--but after ventilating the various positions he is not afraid to let the reader know where he comes out. And this is where the insight comes in. Vaitheeswaran brings to these questions the respect for markets and marketlike mechanisms of a writer for the Economist, the understanding of technology of an M.I.T.-trained engineer, and the sympathy for the plight of the world's poor of an individual born in India--all of which he happens to be. He also happens to have, in my judgment, a good sense of how to think about--and convey--the interplay of the economic, technological, environmental and sociopolitical dimensions of the energy issue as well as the reasons that the uncertainties afflicting our knowledge of all the dimensions do not add up to a good reason for inaction. Among the critically important points about all this that the book convincingly conveys: * Civilization is in no immediate danger of running out of energy or even just out of oil. But we are running out of environment--that is, out of the capacity of the environment to absorb energy's impacts without risk of intolerable disruption--and our heavy dependence on oil in particular entails not only environmental but also economic and political liabilities. * Choices that countries make about energy supply commit them to those choices for decades, because power plants and other energy facilities typically last for 40 years or more and are too costly to replace before they wear out. This is one of the reasons it is imprudent in the extreme to wait for even more evidence than we already have before letting climate-change risks start to influence which energy options we choose. * Energy technologies that exist or are under development could greatly increase energy efficiency in residences and businesses, reduce dependence on oil, accelerate the provision of energy services to the world's poor, increase the reliability and resilience of electricity grids, and shrink the impacts of energy supply on climate and other environmental values. The most promising of these options include renewable sources of a variety of types, advanced fossil-fuel technologies that can capture and sequester carbon, and hydrogen-powered fuel cells for vehicle propulsion and dispersed electricity generation. * These prosperity-building, stability-enhancing and environment-sparing options will not materialize in quantity matching the need unless and until three conditions are met: The massive subsidies favoring continuation of energy business as usual are ended. The massive risks of greenhouse gas-induced climate change are at least partly internalized with a carbon tax or its equivalent. And the industrial nations commit to helping the developing ones "leapfrog" past the inefficient and dirty-energy technologies that fueled the industrialization of the former but mortgaged the environment in the process. There are a few small technical slips in the elaboration of all this, but not many, and none that matter to the thrust of the argument. Written for the intelligent layperson, Vaitheeswaran's book is by far the most helpful, entertaining, up-to-date and accessible treatment of the energy-economy-environment problematique available. Its title, Power to the People, might strike some at first as too cute or too presumptuous. By the time I finished the book, though, I thought the title was apt, and in more ways than one. One must hope that knowledge translates to power in the political sense and that the knowledge to the people conveyed here will help lead to the political outcomes needed to bring the book's optimistic vision into being.

John P. Holdren is Teresa and John Heinz Professor and director of the Program on Science, Technology and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful

Energy is more interesting than you think. October 22, 2003

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Energy is one of those subjects that you don't think about until you have to.
Until that lousy day last summer.

As a technology guy, I've always been somewhat intrigued with the idea of networks (like Distributed / grid computing). So I was intrigued when I heard the author this summer speak about his "energy grid" (which he calls it the Energy Internet). Granted his terminology seemed a little....1990s, but his point made sense: if we were all sharing off the same energy grid, the market would reward those who used less energy and extract from those who use more. And like the internet, the "energy internet" can reroute itself around a problem. (Take that, Ohio!)

What I loved most about this book is that it's not aimed at granola crunchy people. It's also not aimed at the NPR / anti-SUV crowd. I think It's written for the "armchair skeptic" like myself. I'm not stupid enough to think that BP wants to save the world. But I think those ads are meant to influence how we think about energy providers.

We all know that many of the real energy costs aren't being addressed in today's pump prices-- the environment, Enron, Iraq, etc. But the author explains that it's because the real market price ISN'T being represented that we're in such a sorry state. Well, lots of right-wing books contain the "market will solve all of our problems" premise and I would have expected as much from someone who writes for the Economist. But this book doesn't always give the answers that you'd expect. In fact, it was pretty harsh on a few companies who would have probably liked to use him as a poster boy.

Granted, his book title makes it seem like Energy will solve many of the world's problems-- that's just the title. But i'm pretty impressed how well he supported his "save the planet" / environmental stance-- it seemed a bit far-fetched at first. But what he's really talking about is pollution credits and developed / developing world stuff. With India and China's rapid economic growth, the environment took a big hit and it affects all of us.

If I have a small complaint about the book, it's that the author sometimes seems a little too "rah rah" about the "new revolution". (the book title alone makes me cringe a bit). I don't disagree that cheap and efficient hydrogen energy may change the world, I just think that real revolutions are fairly incremental intially and we only realize how incredible they are after we start to reap the benefits. Proclaiming the energy "revolution" and talking about the "energy internet" may have gotten people excited in the New Economy, but we're in the Old New Economy now.

I give this book 5 stars because I'm not the kind of person who would read books on energy and I actually enjoyed it.

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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

Sure Is Sunny In Here June 3, 2004

By doomsdayer520 HALL OF FAME

For an overview of up-and-coming sources of energy for the new millennium you can't do much better than this book, but beware of its very optimistic and not always realistic examinations of the politics and economics of energy. As a policy expert, Vaitheeswaran certainly has keen insights into what is going on in energy today, from actual vs. perceived shortages in fossil fuels to the latest cutting-edge research into new technologies such as fuel cells. Here you will get great insights into how the current market works, with some in-depth debunking of popular assumptions concerning issues like the California crisis in 2000-01, or the true political machinations and motivations of OPEC. Vaitheeswaran ably documents how humans will continue to have access to reliable energy, in whatever form, and that world society is hardly on the brink of a major catastrophic shortage.

However, this book loses steam significantly when Vaitheeswaran starts to analyze the possible political and economic tools that will be necessary to keep the future energy market healthy. Basically, he is dangerously close to the dogma of the free market and free trade as the cure for all ills. Yes, as Americans we know that intelligently managed markets are essential. However, after fruitfully explaining how current energy markets are distorted by cronyism, tax breaks, subsidies, corporate welfare, and other inequitable political shenanigans, the possibility of such distortions is strangely missing from Vaitheeswaran's analyses of future trends. It's as if the free market, once allowed to roll, would suddenly create a perfect world devoid of human corruption, and not just in market-savvy America. This is the unrealistic message overall - a corrupt present shall be replaced by an unrealistic free market utopia around the world. And generally, in attempting to cover all sides of these issues from the point of view of everyone from radical environmentalists to fossil fuel plutocrats, Vaitheeswaran ultimately fails to land squarely in any camp, which saps the power from many of his conclusions. While much of this book is quite useful in describing exciting new technologies, sunny optimism often blinds the reader from dirtier realities. [~doomsdayer520~]

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful

a free-market view of the energy problem February 8, 2004

By R. Hutchinson VINE™ VOICE

Vaitheeswaran writes for the Economist. The good news is that his journalistic account of the energy problem is breezy and easy to read. The bad news is that it is not so much an objective overview of the topic as it is a religious tract from the Church of the Free Market. Vaitheeswaran really pulls you into his optimistic account at times, but regularly slips in sarcastic digs at environmentalists and ecologists that remind you of his ideological bias. What really caused me to question his analysis, though, was his total dismissal of the oil geologists. I personally put much more stock in the projections of the geologists, following Hubbert, than I do in the economists, who always bring to mind Richard Feynman's skeptical view that economics & other social sciences are all voodoo.

I give this book a favorable review regardless, because it is a good introduction to a particular point of view. Without being a market dogmatist, I think Vaitheeswaran has sound points to make about the failure of energy deregulation in California, for instance. He reveals that Britain and Scandinavia (of all places!) have pursued energy deregulation with great success, and argues that it was not deregulation per se that failed, but rather a botched attempt. The first four chapters address "market forces." Vaitheeswaran makes the case that global warming is real and calls for a shift away from carbon-based fossil fuels in the second three chapters. Here, he takes a strong position in favor of carbon taxes, which will not endear him to the anti-tax Republicans, and reveals that his view, while pro-market, is more sensible than most acceptable debate in the U.S. (I do wonder, though, whether he and his editors have read much by Herman Daly and the other ecological economists, who include basic physics in their equations?)

When it comes to the last four chapters on energy technology, Vaitheeswaran has some very interesting things to say, based on his access to the corporate boardrooms. I am encouraged by the shift of Shell and BP (British Petroleum) toward renewable energy research, and no doubt the U.S. oil companies will reluctantly follow suit. The possibility of a decentralized power system, with inputs from local fuel cells, is quite astounding, and it carries some weight coming from the Economist.

I am by no means convinced that the "magic of the market" will bring the world a happy ending to the problem of the finite reserves of oil and natural gas, which are approaching their global Hubbert's Peak. But if markets and far-sighted corporations can be part of the solution, that's great. If we could bring the European view of markets, incorporating carbon taxes, or green taxes, to the U.S. that would be a big step in the right direction!

See my list THE CLEAN/RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION for more on the topics of oil and energy.