A Quote by Vaclav Smil

Our increasingly electrified, electronic, and data-driven society places steadily rising demand on reliable baseload power - that is, on electricity available 24/7/365. Servers never sleep, nor does air conditioning during hot nights, and in Asia's megacities, subways and electric trains take only brief naps between midnight and 5 A.M.
I do my best stuff midmorning and superlate at night, from 1 to 5 in the morning. Some people don't need sleep. I actually do need sleep. I just sleep all the time. I'll catch naps in the afternoon, or I'll take a 20-minute snooze in the office - just all the time. Our business is 24 hours. Our guys in Europe come online at midnight.
Build high-speed, electrified trains over the most-traveled corridors. It'sreally hard to power carbon-free airplanes, but electrified trains are much easier. We'll be a half century behind the Japanese, but better late than never.
I can't tell my people that you will get power only from 6 A.M. to 5 P.M., and after that, we live in darkness. You need 24-hour power; you need a baseload, and that baseload for India is coal. We are looking at clean coal technologies to reduce the impact of pollution.
Losing more of our existing nuclear fleet will make it that much tougher to meet our carbon reduction goals. We need to keep ramping up renewables, but they can't meet our need for reliable power 24/7. Nuclear is a baseload source and it's carbon-free - two things we need.
Data-driven predictions can succeed-and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.
Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.
Good design, when it’s done well, becomes invisible. It’s only when it’s done poorly that we notice it. Think of it like a room’s air conditioning. We only notice it when it’s too hot, too cold, making too much noise, or the unit is dripping on us. Yet, if the air conditioning is perfect, nobody say anything and we focus, instead, on the task at hand.
'Sleep' is a project I've been thinking about for many years. It just seems like society has been moving more and more in a direction where we needed it. Our psychological space is being increasingly populated by data. And we expend an enormous amount of energy curating data.
Human enhancement is now being driven by military imperatives, at least in the US, because civilian society is more conservative in its approach. It’s a missed opportunity for a society-wide push to understand and reduce our need to power the brain down for hours every day. Every hour we sleep is an hour we are not working, finding mates, or teaching our children; if sleep does not have a vital adaptive function to pay for its staggering opportunity cost, it could be ‘the greatest mistake the evolutionary process ever made’.
A reliable electric grid is absolutely necessary to provide drinking water. You have to have the electricity.
A utility can handle up to 20% of production from solar and that helps the grid because it produces electricity when needed. Solar power peaks in the middle of the day and that's also when air conditioning is running and businesses are operating, so power production matches usage.
[I predict] the electricity generated by water power is the only thing that is going to keep future generations from freezing. Now we use coal whenever we produce electric power by steam engine, but there will be a time when there'll be no more coal to use. That time is not in the very distant future. ... Oil is too insignificant in its available supply to come into much consideration.
Land degradation, rising sea levels, famine, and conflict will continue to drive people from their homes and towards cities, with megacities like Mexico City and Lagos becoming increasingly common in some of the poorest parts of the world.
Does it make more sense to provide air conditioning or to limit CO2 emissions. I vote for more air conditioning in these susceptible regions.
Competitiveness demands flexibility, choice and openness - or Europe will fetch up in a no-man's land between the rising economies of Asia and market-driven North America.
The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials, these for organisms are air water & soil, all abundantly available, nor for energy which exists in plenty in the sun and any hot body in the form of heat, but rather a struggle for entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!