It's over!

Apologies for being so quiet for the last few months, but my dissertation has finally been handed in.

For those that are interested, it was mainly a review of Sustainable Energy - without the hot air by David MacKay. Basically while there's a lot of good stuff (explaining climate change/the need for renewables, mythbusting, breakdown of current demand, explaining the physics behind technologies and a few other things), there's actually nothing new in the book.

His simplification of energy policy saw some errors creep in (wind out by a factor of 2, insisting that energy for imports be produced domestically, comparing real costs of renewables to projected costs of nuclear - £1.3billion per GW for Olkiluoto?? - and a few other bits). His sidestepping of economics and environmental concerns means the comparisons of technologies maybe interesting but of little practical use.

I also have concerns over the reducing a technology to a single figure and a few other things, but it doesn't really change his message that renewables will need to be on a large scale and we need to start saying yes to things. However the explosion of its popularity is surprising and MacKay getting the chief scientific advisor job at DECC was stunning. SEWTHA is certainly useful for anyone to read, but they'd need to have some understanding of energy policy already to see where the problems and issues are, and bearing in mind the general target audience of the book, you can kind of see why it has taken off so much.

Having said that, it's still far better than my dissertation.