David MacKay: A reality check on renewables

ORIGINAL: TEDxWarwick

Why you should listen to him:

David MacKay. Photo: TED

David MacKay is a professor of Natural Philosophy in the Physics department at the University of Cambridge and chief scientific adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. He received a degree in Experimental and Theoretical Physics from Trinity College and a PhD. in Computation and Neural Systems as a Fulbright Scholar at Caltech. In 1992, MacKay was made the Royal Society Smithson Research Fellow at Darwin College at University of Cambridge and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2009. He has also taught at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town. In 2003, his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms was published and, in 2008, he self-published Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air. Both books are fully available for free online.

TEDxWarwick - David MacKay - 
How the Laws of Physics Constrain Our Sustainable Energy Options

Department of Climate Change Chief Scientific Advisor, Professor David MacKay FRS, is responsible for ensuring the best science and engineering advice underpins DECC's policy and decision-making.

In addition to his role at DECC, David is Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and then obtained his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. He is internationally known for his research in machine learning, information theory, and communication systems, including the invention of Dasher -- a software interface that enables efficient communication in any language with any muscle. He has taught Physics in Cambridge since 1995 and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

David is the author of the critically acclaimed book, Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air, which is intended to help people understand the numbers around sustainable energy. Video

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