“’Unaccountable statistics’ [are] statistical goulash that sounds tangy and sophisticated but is actually bereft of substance, and used to make predictions that are almost never accounted for. Any number of ‘scientific’ renewable energy reports, from NREL to Stanford to MIT, are of this kind.”

Kent Hawkins’s post yesterday, “Science, Advocacy, and Public Policy,” defends the scientific method against both political correctness and the misuses of the method, often by people who claim to be scientists. This is a major issue in the current energy and climate debate where exaggeration and bias go hand-in-hand. I wish to add support to Hawkins’s theses in light of some of science’s nuanced complexity.

Scientific Inquiry

Here’s how a few mainly twentieth century scientists defined the purpose of scientific inquiry:

“Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world.”–Richard

“These three concepts — gradient, density, and power density — describe the thermodynamic floor beneath civilisation. No policy, no subsidy, and no amount of determination can override them.” (Richard Lyon, below)

Energy engineer/educator Richard Lyon recently illustrated the importance of the key concept of energy density, a subject of note at MasterResource. [1] “The Physics that Demolishes Energy Policy” (March 3, 2026) is taken from Chapter 1 of his book in process.

“There is far more heat energy in a swimming pool than in a pan of boiling water,” he begins.

You can boil an egg in the pan. You can’t boil an egg in the pool. And if you doubled the size of the pool, you’d double the energy available — and still have a cold, raw egg.

This is not a riddle.

Editor’s Note: Master Resource’s founder and editor, Rob Bradley, is currently struggling with the aftermath of torrential flooding in the Texas Hill Country. Until he can return to work, he has asked me to post “classic” MR entries. A blog post explaining Vaclav Smil’s concept of “power density” surely qualifies. This is the key concept for understanding a civilization’s energy needs.

Unfortunately, our MR files contain no concise explanation of the concept in layman’s language. (We have many explanations that no conceivable lay reader—myself most definitely included—could possibly understand or appreciate.) The closest thing I could find to a useful journalistic entry was a blog post by Kent Hawkins—a retired electrical engineer in Ontario—published on February 20, 2013. It is reprinted below.—Roger Donway, Managing Editor.

Power Density Separates the Wheat from the Chaff

By Kent Hawkins — February 20, 2013

“Power density (W/m²) is perhaps the most revealing variable in energetics…”[1]- Vaclav Smil

It may be a bit of an exaggeration to say that understanding power density may be all the average person requires to put our energy sources and needs into perspective, but there is some merit in this argument.…

The much touted benefits of wind come with a fatal caveat: industrial wind turbines–suffering from intermittency, low average-usage factors, remote siting, relatively high (and all-up-front) costs–are uneconomic. So the fact that the Wind industry creates jobs and can piggyback on consumer-chosen, taxpayer-neutral, baseload power is no consolation.

The starting point of economics is that wants exceed resources. Market prices are therefore needed to allocate resources. Out of a wide range of technical possibilities (including wind-produced electricity), only a small subset is economic desirable as well. Think of a bullet train from Los Angeles to New York City–technically possible but uneconomic when compared to air travel. Only freely acting consumers in a government-neutral marketplace can decide the difference.

The new study cosponsored by the American Wind Energy Association, Electricity Markets, Reliability, and the Evolving U.S.…