This book serves as a starting point for energy engineers, sustainability managers, political leaders, and properly informed citizens to explore the net value added by energy systems. Since some resources deplete and some new technologies will require time to emerge, the book takes the reader through the range of costs and benefits, considering the contexts of geography, human needs, and of time. The book takes a particularly close look at the underdeveloped...

Describes how global warming has made the Arctic's oil, gas, natural resources, and minerals more accessible and how competition between nations and corporate interests for control of the resources is endangering the Arctic's fragile ecosystems. --Publisher's description.

"The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with, a jerry-built structure now so rickety and near collapse that a strongwind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under threat from a new source: renewable and variable energy, which puts stress on its logics as much as its components. In entertaining,...