Top 10 TED Talks - 10 - The Future of Enegy

For the last talk in my Top 10 sustainability related TED Talks list, we have Amory Lovins with "A 40-Year Plan for Energy."  Lovins is the chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a consultant, a physicist, and widely regarded as one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on the subject of energy and how we use it.

In this 27 minute talk (unusually long for TED) he lays out in plain English how we can fundamentally change the way we use and generate energy.  The recipe is really quite simple: efficiency first so we are using much less, and then the transition to renewables is much easier.



As Lovins says in this talk, "our energy future is not fate, but choice."  Here (and in many presentations like this one) he lays out a clear and simple road map for how to make the right choices.

Top 10 TED Talks - 6 - Getting Real About Renewable Energy

Number 6 in my Top 10 Sustainability related TED Talks, we have a serious and sobering look at what it would actually mean to produce all of our energy from renewable sources by THeoretical Physicist and generally brilliant person David MacKay (asside from physics, he has a Ph.D in Computation and Neural Systems).

MacKay uses some very rough and simple calculations in this presentation to show that there are some very serious constraints to renewable energy technology available today, and even assuming that we can improve the technology significantly some of those constraints will never go away.  For example: potential energy per unit area is drastically lower for renewables than nuclear, or coal.



I enjoy MacKay's candid, hard nosed look at what the options really are, and the practical return to what is really important: understanding how we use energy and trying to use less.  Only then are renewable energy sources even viable as a replacement for fossil fuels.