Thermodynamics Important in Understanding Key Clean Energy Technologies

I’m trying to come fully up to speed on a few of the areas of chemistry and physics that are most germane to renewable energy and electric transportation. Though I studied all this stuff at a certain level when I was in college about a million years ago, for me, the largest gap in my understanding of these disciplines was — and is —  in thermodynamics. And this is not a good place to have a gap, as the subject applies so broadly, especially in geothermal, concentrated solar power, and bio/synthetic fuels.

So I decided to take a short course.  Fortunately, nowadays there is tons of excellent content online for free.  A good example is these four lectures by Ramamurti Shankar, a truly wonderful physics professor at Yale, recorded in 2006.  (Linked here is the first one, #21.  The others, #22-#24, are easy to find.)  I really enjoyed these, and I hope you will too.

About Ludwig Boltzmann, the most important player in the development of the subject,  the professor Shankar remarks in the last of these talks, “When theoretical physicists visit Vienna, we skip the orchestras, and visit Boltzmann’s tomb, on which is engraved the crowning achievement of his life’s work, the equation representing the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”