Economic and technical imperatives - not any preconceived directives - will keep propelling the process of energy transition.
Interpretation
Energy transition is driven by economic realities and technical needs rather than prior plans.
The quote emphasizes that the shift towards alternative energy sources is primarily influenced by the economic and technical conditions of the time instead of any pre-existing guidelines or intentions. Vaclav Smil suggests that it is the practical aspects of energy production and consumption that will dictate how and when the transition occurs, highlighting the importance of adaptability and responsiveness to changing circumstances in the energy sector.
In practice
In a speech about future energy policies, I emphasized how economic and technical factors shape our transition strategies.
I've read about 80 books a year for the past 50 years. I come from cultural breeding. I don't have a cellphone. When you spend all your time checking your cellphone messages, or updating your Facebook (of course I don't have a Facebook page) then you don't have any time for reading.
Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing - from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What's very important is in-house research.
America tends to assume Silicon Valley-style innovators can drive quick and transformative changes, but even Silicon Valley's would-be masters of the universe have discovered that energy transitions are subject to time spans and technical constraints that defy their reach.
Everyone [in higher education] was what I call drillers of deeper wells. These academics sit at the bottom of a deep well and they look up and see a sliver of the sky. They know everything about that little sliver of sky and nothing else. I scan all my horizons.
Most scientific or engineering discoveries would never become successful products without contributions from other scientists or engineers. Every major invention is the child of far-flung parents who may never meet.
I'm old fashioned. I'm not one of these young guys who think they are so smart that they can prescribe what humanity ought to do. Humanity never learns any lessons. Prescriptions don't matter. We already know exactly what to do. We just don't do it.
One can't predict the weather more than a few days in advance.
Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.
You can make a stack high enough to reach the moon and back, and only then will you have used your 100 billion hamburgers. This is terrifying news to cows.
You have to test your hypothesis against other theories. Certainty in the face of complex situations is very dangerous.
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. String theory does so again because a point particle is replaced by a string, which is more spread out.
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