Sustainable Energy Systems | Joseph Clarke | TEDxUniversityofStrathclyde

This talk argues for a balanced approach to the transformation of present energy use and delivery systems as society seeks to evolve solutions that address concerns about energy cost, reliability, security and environmental impact.
Joe Clarke is a professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at Strathclyde. He is also the director of the Energy Systems Research Unit at this university. The ESRU is an internationally recognised research centre that is looking into new approaches to the built environment, energy demand reduction and sustainable means of energy supply.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at ted.com/tedx

[@mohdshahromismail]

He was my professor ages ago, a great guy he is

[@kiss109fm]

Great presentation.

[@vickiliu8068]

cool!

[@sambrusco672]

Could someone from London or Florida dub this video. Sorry, but it’s like listening to Scrooge McDuck or Shrek talk about renewable energy. When I was 16, I deliberately changed my accent from New England to generic American English. You can too Professor, at least for international audiences.
Second, did he say “If you can’t prove that it will work, don’t do it”?? Oh great! He just provided a chant for 99% of the world to do nothing. What if the Wright Brothers or Jonas Salk or Alexander Graham Bell had had that attitude?

[@Marius-cr6oj]

I disagree with the fact, that you should just start a change in the system, if you have scientific proof it solves the problem. Humanity has always been about trial and error, the evolution of good ideas and the discarding of others. Just from the moment you utilize the diversity of approaches and ideas in different societies, you create a bottom up way of problem solving. Calculating the absolute truth and then enforcing it top down rarely was a good idea, was it? In my opinion, the individual human is a pretty great sensor for it's own comfort. So what our society needs is more of a "just do it"-approach first and an honest evaluation second, rather than simulating every little detail of what might happen.
Simulations are always biased by the person who asks a question and are often leading to the answers the questioner wanted to hear in the first place.
Especially for broad questions like "How do we want and how should we live in the future?" humans are, in my opinion, overestimating their rationality trying to foresee an ideal development.
As you said, if you're able to break up problems in a limited amount of discrete chunks, simulation is the right tool to solve it. If the problem is very abstract and the modelling error leads to questionable end results, maybe an evolutionary strategy of trial and error is the way to go.
Thank you for this talk. It made me think and this is what a format like this is designed for.