Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air

2026 revised edition · work in progress

About this edition

This is a work-in-progress 2026 revised edition of David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air (2008), rebuilt with Quarto from the markdown source preserved by the Life Itself climate project.

MacKay’s text and his own figures are reproduced unchanged. New material added in this revision is marked in the chapter where it appears; the first such chapter is The value of renewable energy as it scales in Part II.

The original book is © 2008 David J. C. MacKay and licensed CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 UK. This edition carries the same licence. Figures that carry third-party rights — the Private Eye cartoons, named-photographer photos, and the Ordnance Survey Crown Copyright maps — are omitted here and marked in place, because MacKay’s licence did not extend to them.