Evolution Of Growing Electricity Markets

The book I read to research this post was Evolution Of Growing Electricity Markets by Various Authors which is an excellent book that I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. This book is about the various electricity generating boards around the world roughly since the 90’s. Two major developments in that time have been the emphasis on global warming and deregulation in many countries where often the boards have been privatized and competition from competing companies has been encouraged. With the former many countries like Britain have decided they are going to focus more on atomic power which doesn’t cause global warming but does have risks which could be far worse. In the wake of the Fukishama power station in Japan being badly damaged by an earthquake and tsunami many countries like Germany and Belgium have decided they will faze out nuclear power for electricity production. In the case of Germany many of the older ones have been closed and they are planning on closing all by 2022. In Japan only 2 out of 50 nuclear reactors are still being used. In the wake of the  nuclear leak they had a problem in that they didn’t have enough electricity generated in the Tokyo to satisfy demand. In other regions there was plenty of power but it had to be converted between 60 HZ and 50 HZ which is a complicated process and there were only a limited number of sub-stations able to do this. Many had to go without electricity. Japan still faces a dilemma that if they don’t replace the nuclear power station with some other form of electricity generation soon it will have an adverse effect on the economy. They have plans to buy electricity from the United States but laying supply lines could take time. Australia has a bit of a similar dilemma in that they can link up the various states with in their country to guarantee supply in times of high energy use. Australia only has a sparse and fairly small population and laying a supply from one state to another is very expensive given the amounts of electricity involved. This is a really interesting book which is around 880 pages so is quite substantial. I thoroughly enjoyed reading and definitely would recommend it. The book takes the subject on a country by country basis and is absolutely loaded with information. It is a must read.

 

Hybrid Reality

The book I read to research this post was Hybrid Reality by Parag Khanna et al which is an excellent book that I bought from kindle. This book is only around 80 pages but is rather interesting as it is about how the world will change in around the next 30 years. If you look at the world now you will see many of the problems like the proliferation of private armies, recession, unemployment and stock market slumps have always been with us in one form or another. In the cases of stock market slumps and recessions it follows cycles. A lot of what will happen in the future can be predicted. We can also see trends like things getting smaller to the extent in future they will probably be implanted in people like continous access to the internet and each other via this. There will be an emancipation of people in places like Africa for example currently workers are expected to work in poor and high risk conditions in cobalt mines which is a necessary element in technology. Conditions for people like this will improve. Countries like India and China will continue on their paths to super power status. More and more money in those countries will be ploughed in to technology research. Ultimately robots will gradually replace human workers. Currently in South Korea robots are being used instead of teachers to teach English to children in rural schools. Silicon chips will become a misnomer as biotechnology takes over in this regard and the transistors on chips are likely to get smaller and smaller until they reach atomic particle and sub-atomic level. Currently research is going on in this. Technology of the existing kind will get cheaper and cheaper and more and more plentiful. Everyone will have a tablet of one sort or another. America due to its multi culturalism and huge amount of resources will still play a major role on the world stage but it is likely to become more of a level playing field. One thing America because of its huge amount of different races is lots of ideas which can’t be replicated by other countries. I did thoroughly enjoy this book which I think as with any good technology book really makes you think. Naturally I recommend it.