Energy: Past, Present, and Future

Energy—and its impact on global climate change—is a major focus of US federal and state public policy. College enrollment in courses treating energy, environment and climate has skyrocketed. The decline of the financial system has caused many job-seekers to look for work in the burgeoning sector of clean energy technologies. Government stimulus has pumped billions of dollars into helping to create "green jobs" and accelerate the transition to renewable energy. Venture capitalists have recently invested more money in "clean tech" than in software and semiconductors.

This surge of interest in energy and climate change from people with a wide range of backgrounds creates the need for literature that both educates the novice about how the global energy system works and offers suggestions for how some of the enormous challenges we face can be solved. Three recent books attempt to give the reader this context, and add new ideas to the ongoing debate about how to address concerns of rising energy prices, energy security, and environmental protection.

The first, Energy: Perspectives, Problems, and Prospects, by Michael B. McElroy, provides an encyclopedic background on the history of the energy system. It walks the reader through the major sources of primary energy—wood, coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, wind, and nuclear—offering a brief background on each fuel, a history of its use, the environmental problems it creates, and prospects for its future use. This background is followed by a description of how steam power, electricity, and the internal combustion engine work, largely focused on the chemical and thermodynamic principles that drive these processes. He includes a case study of carbon capture and sequestration and another on ethanol fuels, before concluding with a list of technologies that are likely to be part of a low carbon future.

The book is most useful in providing two types of information. The first is the history of energy use in modern societies, focusing on coal, oil and natural gas. McElroy presents a timeline for each fossil fuel, explaining the major milestones along the way and describing how each fuel evolved. By focusing so much on the past, however, the book does not give the reader a comprehensive understanding of the energy system as it operates today, much less how it is likely to develop.

The two case studies, on carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and on ethanol fuels, are interesting, potentially useful case studies for an engineering class to understand the limitations of these two solutions and the calculations that go into understanding them in a broader context. The author's discussion of CCS and ethanol assumes a solid understanding of the fundamentals of physics, chemistry, and thermodynamics. To the math-phobic reader, these chapters, as well as much of the rest of the book, may be intimidating. Little effort is made to explain obstacles, specific technological improvements, and policies that might help maximize the value from these thermal power technologies.

McElroy successfully provides engineering knowledge about the most common energy technologies. To be sure, this canon of information is necessary for any serious student, policy-maker, or energy industry employee. All too often, grand ideas about the energy system are proposed by people who do not know the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour. But the book is not particularly focused on offering new ideas and solutions to the academic literature surrounding energy, spending just 16 of its 400 pages describing the coming energy future.

A Smart Energy Policy, by James M. Griffin, distills the goals of energy policy as providing energy that is "cheap, clean, and secure." The book describes how current supplies of energy all provide some of these goals, but fall short in others. It has an insightful case study on the cause of the oil price spike from 2004–2008, delving into the respective impacts of China...