3 HN users recommended this talk3 months2015–2017score 3.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN recommends it as an approachable, numbers-driven overview of what renewable energy would take.
David MacKay, scientific advisor to the UK energy department, gives a Harvard talk on sustainable energy at macro and micro scale, drawn from his book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. It stresses the land area renewables require.
“The author also gave a talk a few years ago that is very approachable[2].” (HN, 2016)
I felt the 'area needed in the US' to be a bit disingenuous. I very much recommend David Mackay's Without the Hot Air, a great talk he did at Harvard on area required can be found here: [this video] Beyond that, very glad to see this happen. It's one of the factors necessary to push a sustainable electrified future forward.
MacKay's Harvard talk on land area required for renewable energy
I recently started reading "Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air"[1], which is available as a free book, and it's been a wonderful introduction to reasoning about alternative energy. The author also gave a talk a few years ago that is very approachable[2]. [1] [link] [2] [this video]
Approachable talk by the author of Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air
If you haven't read Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air , by David Mackay, I recommend it. Free download: [link] About the author: David MacKay FRS is the Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and then obtained his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. He is internationally known for his research in machine learning, information theory, and communication systems, including the invention of Dasher, a software interface that enables efficient communication in any language with any muscle. He was appointed a Lecturer in the Department of Physics at Cambridge in 1995 and was a Professor in the Department of Physics from 2003 to 2013. Since 2005, he has devoted much of his time to public teaching about energy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Nine months after the publication of 'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air', David MacKay was appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. TED talk: [link] Harvard talk: [this video]
Very good point. Plus even if the marginal cost is lower than a dedicated solar facility, we don't necessarily have that luxury. We do if we want just 5% sustainable energy, not a problem. But if we want 99% sustainable energy, surface area is a very tricky challenge [0] and so it'd be a matter of the one and the other, instead of the one or the other. [0] [this video]
Surface area is a tricky challenge for fully sustainable energy
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
4 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more
Citations, criticism and jokes