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"Energy Revolution? More like a Crawl" - Dr. Vaclav Smil

Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design · 59.2K views · 2015-09-20 · 1:48:56

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Overview

Energy scholar Vaclav Smil argues that global energy transitions are slow and that renewable targets should not rest on wishful thinking. He appraises how energy dependencies are likely to change and asks for using much less.

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HN recommends it as a grounded, data-driven counter to hype about quick energy revolutions.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2017–2022

Topics

Renewables, batteries & storageClimate policy, solutions & debateEarth & energy (other)
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vaclav smilenergyrenewablesfossil fuelssustainability

What people said

Scea91 · 2018-08 · Strong recommendation

Exactly, we haven't achieved that much actually. Most of the technology we use for harvesting energy is not much further from what people could imagine in 19th century. Turbine was invented in the 19th century. I really suggest watching this talk by Smil [VIDEO] and if you are interested reading some books from him about energy and oil. Really insightful.

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lcamach84 · 2020-09 · Recommendation

I encourage you to look at the work of Vaclav Smil [1] . There's no such thing as clean energy. [1] [VIDEO]

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tedsanders · 2017-05 · Recommendation

That is a bizarre claim to make. Energy will not be far cheaper and more abundant in 10 years. Trillions of dollars are invested in infrastructure that has lifetimes of 50+ years. It is not economically or technologically feasible to undergo an energy revolution that quickly. Even if we gathered the political and financial will, our production facilities and supply chains could not feasibly handle the load of rebuilding the world's energy infrastructure in a single decade. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design, played through YouTube.

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