an exceptional book for understanding energy

The central idea of the book is energy can be leveraged to impact global economy, and thus the importance of energy security can never be overstated. The author, Daniel Yergin, touches almost every branch of energy to make his ideas balanced and unbiased.

The first part of the book is on conventional energy, mainly fossil fuels. Daniel focuses on how giant energy companies leverage financial crises to acquire competitors and reduce cost. However, the eventual cost of energy paid by the end-users is strongly related to geopolitics. In here, politicians' strategic plans to secure and transport fuels from producers at low cost comes into play. These plans strongly influence national security especially when energy price rises unexpectedly. Reading of this part of the book really helps to understand different countries' energy policies from a geopolitical aspect. Surely I'll come back to read this part again.

The left part of the book includes nuclear power, renewable energy, smart grid, energy efficiency and electric vehicles. I'm quite familiar with all these topics before reading this book, but it's still intriguing when all those ideas are unfolded in a connected way. The questions explored here are: what's the future of nuclear power after Fukushima; how to accelerate the deployment of solar, wind and biofuels; why efficiency is also a source of energy; what's electric vehicles' role in reducing greenhouse gas emission. The impact of all these clean energy have been well explained in terms of energy security and climate change.