I’m a contrarian, so I tend to believe that it’s darkest before dawn about a lot of things. And things are pretty dark when even the IEA is saying things like “we are seeing the door for a 2 degree Celsius target about to be closed and closed forever.” I do think we may be … Continue Reading
[F]ree energy does not occur in nature… There’s one thing about that Orlov quote that has struck me over the years: how it applies more broadly than he originally meant it. It’s not just that what we generally think of as free energy doesn’t occur in nature, but also that free energy does occur in … Continue Reading
I recently understood the elegance of H.T. Odum’s concept of transformity. The transformity table presented at the link above shows that electricity has a transformity of 300,000 seJ/J, where seJ stands for solar-equivalent joule. It’s a weird unit, so I tried to digest it as follows: to produce electricity requires 300,000 solar-equivalent joules per joule. … Continue Reading