Driven by Demand: How Energy Gets its Power

by Jimmy Y. Jia, Jason Crabtree

Energy plays a central role in shaping our society and infrastructure, making it increasingly important for today's leaders to understand the impact of energy decisions. Discussions about energy often neglect important historical lessons about previous energy transformations and provide inadequate consideration of context - Driven by Demand takes a fresh approach by exploring the emergence of energy systems, outcomes and priorities. It outlines select historical and current events, challenges, and developing energy trends using a range of case studies. Readers will gain foundational knowledge about energy flows and end-uses, helping them to become more conversant about energy outcomes and priorities. This accessible book paves the way for broader discussions about societal resilience, privacy, and security concerns associated with the move towards 'smart' infrastructure. This is a must-read for business executives, policymakers and students working in energy policy, energy management and sustainable business.

402 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 31, 2015

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great look at some various ways in which energy is leveraged in capitalist pursuits. The book presents some theory, and a mix of impacts on its application. This is work grounded in economic theory, not simply a cheerleading pamphlet for sustainable energy management - and that makes it really great for thinking about capitalist and regulatory means for driving better energy generation and usage. Sometimes the writing gets a bit into the weeds on details that don't further the authors' points, but stick with it - there's a lot of real insight around energy as an asset.

I'd love a follow up on measurement - a review of the future landscape for data capture, metrics that can drive changes in the board room, and more examples of implementations of the smart grid that suggest a bridge between the monopolistic constraints of energy generation today and decentralization that democratizes our energy needs.

[Christophe Jospe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nerd alert! This book will be highly enjoyable for people who like to think about the complexities of the energy system. It's definitely a book that would fit well in a university setting to lay a broad foundation for students who are learning about the different dynamics that face decision makers when it comes to energy. I wouldn't have read it if I wasn't interviewing one of the authors on a podcast, but I'm glad I did. I got it out of the library, and for people who are looking for getting a good grasp (for free) of energy systems for a leg up in their career or to be dangerous at a cocktail party in discussing energy systems from an engineering or policy perspective, versus attending a grad program that would probably assign this book to the syllabus, it's a good way to go. Or if you're like me and already paid for that expensive grad program, it will refresh things you learned, and probably add some things you didn't. Context for energy production, transmission, and consumption, is everything, and being able to discern why some things work in some places, and not in others, how they got to be the way they are, and how we might expect them to be different in the future are key things that this book does very well.

The book starts with laying out different forms of energy; electricity, heat, light, motion, chemical, and earth, and the fundamental of what energy really is: the capacity to do work. It has a nice distinction between energy and power:
Energy= capacity to do work
Power = rate of work being done
Energy = power * time

It reminds us of the three laws of thermodynamics — 1) energy cannot he created or destroyed. In an isolated system, everything is in balance. 2) one form of energy can be converted to any other form of energy — light energy, chemical energy, electric energy, kinetic energy, wave energy, electromagnetic energy 3) energy conversions always incur losses — wasted energy, efficiency = useful energy out/energy in

I was pleased to see the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory flow diagram which does a good job with the contextualization. https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/
Context with data centers vs refining alumninum w/ metallurgical coal
-peaker plants
-energy as a wicked problem

I enjoyed the dialogues on reducing energy poverty with simple facts like the US poorest fifth spends 10% of their income on energy vs 2.5% of the richest fifth. When thinking about how this relates to addressing the carbon externality, the book does a good job spelling out the implications of this being a consumer pays or polluter pays model. Perhaps surprisingly, my favorite part of this book was the contextualization of taxes in how they relate to energy. What are the different types of taxes? A sales tax=flat tax, progressive tax increases as taxable base amount increases, like an income tax
Regressive means the rate decreases as the amount paid increases. An example of this is social security capped at 6.2% for $102,00. Pigouvian tax is applied to a negative externality— like a tax on smoking. There are taxes by weight. Trucks account for less than 1% of vehicles but 30% of cost for the transportation system. Taxes by mile by time of day
I finally feel like I've found a book that doesn't get jargonny when discussing interoperability. “Smart grid capable of enabling bio directional flows of information. In the energy transformation that will come from smart grids, Jia points to the need for decision support systems to fuse historical data with analytical models to move as far as possible towards establishing a causal relationship. As an entrepreneur thinking about something similar, this last point really resonated!