Skip to main content

Power Shift - Robert Arthur Stayton ***

Reviewing this book is frustrating because it does a really important job - but doesn't do it in a particularly effective fashion.

 Let's get into that important job first. The book is about the need to move to solar energy, driven by the impact of manmade climate change. The most impressive thing about Power Shift is that it persuaded me that we should produce significantly more of our energy from solar. I've got some problems with Robert Stayton's assertion that all our energy could come from solar for a couple of reasons. Most of his information is sweeping and global, but I think really it is US-based, assumed to apply globally. It would be much harder to get all of the UK's energy from solar than the US quite simply because we don't have frequent enough sunny days. It is also a little cherry-picking, taking pessimistic views of the alternatives and optimistic on solar. While I think we could produce a good percentage of UK energy from solar given sufficient storage, we would also need backup nuclear to fill in gaps and, most importantly to deal with situations Stayton doesn't cover, like Krakatoa-like incidents which would drastically reduce solar availability for a couple of years at a time.

 However, Stayton is indubitably right in saying that solar is the obvious source and that we should be putting in far more effort both in collection and in storage technologies to iron out the daily and seasonal variation in solar capacity. Yes, we will probably need to work on carbon capture and storage to get us through to a mainly solar economy (plus the nuclear backup he doesn't like), but solar should be seen as far more significant than it currently is. And this book makes the case so strongly that if you read it, you may well be persuaded of this idea.

 Now, though, the less encouraging side. I don't think anyone who isn't already convinced will read the book, because the only sensible way to persuade someone is to start with a balanced view and work towards the conclusion, where the book clearly starts from a specific viewpoint, obvious even in its subtitle. It also suffers from one of the oldest problems in publishing - the significant content is really only about three magazine articles, expanded to fill a book. You could quite easily get all the important message across in articles covering climate change, energy options and how to implement solar. The result is a lot of repetition and labouring of the point. As an example, Stayton lists out 20 'positives for solar PV [photovoltaic - i.e. solar panels generating electricity]', then proceeds to slowly explain each of these points separately. We really don't need much expansion on, for instance, 'Solar PV does not pollute our air,' but we get nearly a page.

 This kind of heavy handedness is particular obvious in spending around 60 pages telling us very obvious background on how human energy use has gone from fire to modern consumption. It's neither very interesting nor highly relevant to the point of the book. Another problem is the way that the author pushes the bottom-up approach, building his argument on his own position where he generates 90% of his energy from solar panels on his house. The fact is, the vast majority of people in the UK could not do this, both in terms of the relatively tiny amount of energy generated over the darker half of the year and also because many UK homes simply aren't suitable to stick solar on the roof. We tend to have much smaller houses than in the US - and, for instance, though my roof is technically big enough, it's not south-facing, which immediately renders it pretty much useless for generation. By giving us a model that just doesn't work for most of us, Stayton hinders rather than helps the message.

 While Stayton's countrymen in the US are still arguing in large numbers that manmade climate change doesn't exist, the fact is that the arguments of this book are likely to be ignored. Which is a shame, because as I noted, it has genuinely persuaded me that we ought to make solar our biggest source, provided we put enough effort into developing more efficient energy storage mechanisms. There's a lot to interest anyone serious about our energy impact on the planet here, provided you are tolerant of the book's lack of conciseness. So it's a qualified cheer for this vision of a solar future.
Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Meteorite Hunters - Joshua Howgego *****

This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geology tends to be one of the least entertaining scientific subjects but here (I suppose, given that geo- refers to the Earth it ought to be astrology... but that might be a touch misleading). Here, though, there is plenty of opportunity to capture our interest. The first part of the book takes us both to see meteorites and to hear stories of meteorite hunters, whose exploits vary from erudite science trips to something more like an Indiana Jones outing. Joshua Howgego takes us back to the earliest observations and discoveries of meteorites and the initial doubt that they could have extraterrestrial sources, through to explorations of deserts and the Antarctic - both locations where it tends to be easier to find them. I, certainly, had no idea about the use of camera networks to track incoming meteors, which not only try to estimate where they wi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Against the Odds - John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin ****

The number of women working in STEM subjects has expanded dramatically, but as John and Mary Gribbin make clear, in the history of science this is a very recent occurrence. Here, they bring us the stories of 12 women, from Eunice Newton Foote, born in 1819, to Vera Rubin, born in 1928 - effectively covering nearly 200 years in that Rubin died as recently as 2016. There are some names that will already be familiar from popular science histories (and deservedly so). You will find, for instance, Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin represented. But there are plenty like Foote that few will have come across, including Inge Lehmann, Chien-Sung Wu and Lucy Slater. While arguably Foote is there primarily to demonstrate the difficulties she faced (her discovery of an aspect of greenhouse gas behaviour was independently bettered within weeks), the rest have all made significant discoveries or developments against the odds and often missed out the recognition the deserved. The most prominent ob...
Post a Comment
Read more