Current progress can be found here.

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My experience of David MacKay was of a brilliant, patient, and kind person who I was fortunate to have had a few wonderful conversations with.

Looking back on his book and on our email exchanges¹ I realise now how huge an inspiration his approach was for my life trajectory: I was equally bemused by the hot air of confusing conversation, so much so that I quit my biotech PhD² to try to build some kind of new medium for collective sense making. Fast forward 15 years and I'm still trying, but feel like it's closer now, and again I find myself returning to David's work to act as another foundational pillar and guide in that journey.

His book "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air" is a rational and strategic assessment of how the UK might power itself sustainably.

As we approach the 10th anniversary of his death I was reminded by Anil Madhavapeddy of a plan to update the book with the changes to the UK's energy system that have occurred since the book was published in 2009.

And to load it into a wiki which will allow it to be kept updated at by anyone going forwards.

* edit *

I've since decided that building a simpler dashboard powered by the numbers, and equations David collated in the book would be a slightly more achievable project.

Though this is still a big undertaking and one that I will not be able to complete myself.

The Energy Budget

In the book, amongst many other things, David mapped out two stacks:

• What is our energy demand
• Would could be our sustainable energy supply (excluding nuclear)

Plan

Phase 1: Recreate Energy Budget Stacks

• Load the data and equations for these two stacks into a wiki
  • ☑ all top level number are add to the wiki
  • ~ top level numbers for each chapter are calculated from all the "lower level" numbers and calculations
• ☑ Build a simple dashboard to show the two stacks side by side

Phase 2: Allow for Alternatives

For uncontroversial and obvious improvements to the data and model that forms the national energy budget, these can be made directly to the wiki pages.

However, there are two cases were I think we'll want to capture alternative values:

1. To record a previous version of the data and model.

For example I think it would useful to record David's original 2009 version. And in the future it would be useful to record a government plan, or a proposed plan by a different department, academic group, political party or citizen scientists. This will allow people who have read either David's 2009 work, or heard of a different proposal, to orientate themselves in relation to the latest version in the Wiki or another alternative.

2. For data describing the future, this is inherently uncertain, and for in some cases I could imagine it would be useful to be able to capture different scenarios.

So we need a way to capture alternatives of different concepts and show relevant differences.

• ☑ wikisim should allow users to capture alternative values for Wiki concepts.
  • ☑ Start to update the data and equations in the wiki and dashboard with some of the changes to the UK's energy system that have occurred since the book was published in 2009. -- e.g.: Energy demand of heating water in UK 15 kWh per person per day (general wiki) vs Energy demand of heating water in UK 12 kWh per person per day (Alternative according to Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, 2009, Prof. Mackay )
• allow the user to show different alternatives of the stacks side by side.
• show a knowledge graph with relative differences between the two versions of the stacks, and allow users to click through to see the details of those differences.

Would you like to help?

If you'd like to get involved:

• please share this project with anyone you think might be interested
• edit the wiki!
• send me an email :)

Current Progress

Please see here.

This is a temporary micro site so expect its location to change when the project moves, I'll put in a redirect.

The current micro site also has its code embedded within my larger personal website so needs a little work to make it independent.

WikiSim

Whilst I think it is a suitable platform for this project if there is one with a better fit please let me know. WikiSim is all open source, and all open data, so the data would be trivial to scrap, and republish to another platform.