Sir David Mackay [0] was a great mind who contributed major discoveries in Machine Learning, Information Theory, Coding Theory and Physics. His book "Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms" is a great resource for anyone learning ML and who wants to understand how ML, Information Theory and Statistics all fit together. The book is available for free download as a pdf [1] as well as for purchase.<p>His untimely death from cancer in 2016 at the age of 48 is a big loss to Science. His book on Climate Change "Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air" (also available as pdf) [2] is a testament to breadth and versatility of his scientific interests.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._C._MacKay" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._C._MacKay</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.withouthotair.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.withouthotair.com/</a><p>EDIT: typos
It sounds like this should have a date attached to it as the numbers are quite outdated for todays world. This did have some good data for back when it was written of course.<p>* An efficient EV will do less than 12kWh/100km these days.<p>* Utility scale solar pv cost declines have been dramatic. It is now the cheapest form of new energy to deploy.<p>* Developments in deep water off-shore wind have led to much larger turbines which are capturing more wind energy for longer periods of time.<p>* Large scale batteries are now viable as a storage mechanism for renewables and are going to rapidly replace things like peaker plants.<p>* Lots of new research is happening with Nuclear like thorium/molten-salt reactors which will still be important for baseload generation.
Have a look at
<a href="http://2050-calculator-tool.decc.gov.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://2050-calculator-tool.decc.gov.uk/</a><p>(I was David's Editor for "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air". There's been quite a bit of interest in updating the book, but there are obvious difficulties. If have suggestions, let me know.
Niall Mansfield
sewtha-2.0@uit.co.uk
)
It‘s such a tragedy that he died so young. Prof Mackay was a role model who impacted our world in many positive ways (e.g. his work in information theory, Bayesian statistics, environmental science). I recommend his lecture on information theory which is available on youtube [1]. He also documented the progress of his cancer very detailed on his blog [2], which is a very interesting (and sad) read.<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/BCiZc0n6COY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/BCiZc0n6COY</a><p>[2] <a href="http://itila.blogspot.com/?m=1" rel="nofollow">http://itila.blogspot.com/?m=1</a>
One thing that feels a bit strange to me is that he uses timelines of 1000 years when calculating nuclear reserves. I don’t believe we need a plan for the next 1000 years - think of what our understanding of power generation and transmission was a millennium ago. Assuming that we will still be using the same technologies in 1000 years seems a bit pessimistic to me.
Before research into sustainable energy, David MacKay had rediscovered Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes in early 90s, perhaps the most common type of error correction codes used nowadays in commercial systems (alongside with Reed Solomon codes used for storage).<p>He then worked on sustainable energy long before it became fashionable.<p>His early death was a significant loss. He blogged cheerfully from hospital til few days before his death<p><a href="http://itila.blogspot.com/2016/04/perhaps-my-last-post-well-see.html?m=1" rel="nofollow">http://itila.blogspot.com/2016/04/perhaps-my-last-post-well-...</a><p>Rest In Peace David MacKay.
I highly recommend Prof. Tom Murphy's new book "Energy and Human Ambitions" (freely available as well) that is sort of a deeper dive into some of the questions that Mackay explored:<p><a href="https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m" rel="nofollow">https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m</a>
The original of this book is a wonderful resource. I am very happy to see a community bringing it up-to-date because MacKay had the foresight to license the work using CC.
There was indeed a lot of hot air in sustainability thoughts in 2008, and probably still is, but Mackay's treatment is sometimes bordering the absurd.<p>For instance, the chapter on wind power starts by comparing a back of the envelope calculation on wind power with energy usage by a fossil car.<p>While there are occasional good points, I would not recommend reading this book unless you actually know something about the things the book is discussing. It's simply too misleading in important places.<p>In case anyone is wondering about this, there are real studies on the feasibility of 100% renewables by organizations that actually know this stuff and have done the modelling work.
Alas, this is probably pointless.<p>Some technologies (PV, batteries, wind) have improved by an order of magnitude - and swamp out all other considerations.<p>EDIT: to be clear, i loved the original book, and have re-read it several times over the years.
I wonder if he'd be happy that his legacy seems to have just fueled fossil fuel funded conspiracies by adding some aura of credibility to their lies.<p>I can't imagine he would.
Didn't this book also assume substantial biomass energy grown in the UK? If I recall correctly, it was negative on solar due to land use, but that was mostly due to this biomass (which has extremely low energy capture efficiency, requiring a lot of land.)