The Global Energy Trap and a Way Out

This important book not only provides a clear account of the energy and climate crisis, but also an interesting and quite feasible solution to it. Modern industrial civilisation is built on energy derived from fossil fuels, which is driving unsustainable global warming that threatens further and more extreme disruption of the global climate. We cannot in fact afford to use all the fossil fuels still in the ground if we are to contain temperature rise. The exponential rise in population over the last century has been permitted the existence of cheap and abundant energy also applied to agriculture, so we now face overpopulation, potentially catastrophic climate change, exhaustion of mineral resources, food and water shortages, peak oil and energy shortage – this last problem is likely to become particularly acute in the UK, where one third of energy generation capacity will be lost between 2012 and 2020. All these challenges are clearly explained in the first part, where the author also analyses the geopolitical aspects of oil in relation to the Middle East. He is sceptical about the capacity of wind to plug the gap, as its unreliability and lack of storage potential means that there has to be a central backup. We need a revolution in energy storage.

The rest of the book explains Frank's ideas for addressing the global energy trap. Already in 1897, Tesla was emphasising the need to evolve means for obtaining energy from inexhaustible stores using perfect methods that do not involve consumption and waste. He thought that the realisation of this idea was close, but he came up against the interests of the oil and energy industry, who favoured macrogeneration and centralised distribution in order to maximise their profits. The fact that Tesla's ideas were not pursued is tragic. Frank puts forward two radical microgeneration concepts, the E-Plus house that generates more than consumes, along with what he calls K-gen as a meta-system using collection, conversion, concentration, conservation, and control to achieve a very smart grid. He explains the various components in some detail, and the scheme looks extremely promising if only it were taken seriously, which he points out is really a question of imagination, motivation and mobilisation of human effort. There are increasing signs that these global challenges are being taken more seriously, but, as argued in many books reviewed on these pages, our current mind set, time horizon and institutions are quite inadequate to the scale the challenge. Books like this serve to raise awareness and clarify ideas about potential effective policies and actions.