Book review Title: Principles of Sustainable Energy Author(s): Frank Kreith, Jan Kreider Number of Chapters: 12 Chapters. 855 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4398-1407-9 “This book is one of few books that cover most of the renewable energy resources. The adopted treatment in this book is comprehensive in the sense that it covers the fundamental, physical, theoretical, mathematical, technological, economical and environmental aspects and features of each renewable energy resource.” Prof. Moh’d A. Al-Nimr, member of EGY Book Review Panel Every body realizes the importance of renewable energy resources in presenting a resolution for the energy crisis. The energy strategic plans for almost all countries raise the share of renewable energy in the predicted future energy needs. Raising the renewable energy share highlights the importance of preparing well educated and trained engineers and technicians in different renewable energy sectors. Academic institutions and universities recognized the importance of this issue and increase the offered graduate and undergraduate courses in renewable energy fields. The literature is rich in books specialized in these fields. However, many of these books concentrate on certain renewable energy resources but not on all of them. On the other hand, many books focus on certain aspects and features and ignore others. The litera- ture is poor in books that consider all available renewable energy resources and cover all possible aspects and features such as their potential, statistics, fundamentals, performance, technology, economics, etc. “Principles of Sustainable Energy”, a text book authored by Frank Kreith and Jan Kreider, aims to cover almost all renewable energy resources. The book considers the physics, modeling, behavior, calculations, potential, generation, conversion, utilization, storage, technology, manufacturing, economics and management of these renewable resources. The book is designed for courses at the senior or first-year graduate level in engineering and assumes that reader has a basic understanding of thermody- namics and heat transfer, as well as knowledge of spreadsheets and computer skills. The book contains 12 Chapters presented in 855 pages and pub- lished by Taylor and Francis Group in 2011. Chapter 1 discusses role of water, food and energy in achieving sustainable development. The chapter emphasizes the interrelation between the social, economic, environmental and technical aspects of the sustainability issue. The chapter presents a summary of avail- able energy resources, options of energy generation and conserva- tion, and the need to consider the financial ramifications and the energy return on energy investment of various technologies for future energy generation. Chapter 2 covers the principles and basics of engineering economics to be used later in the financial evaluation of different renewable energy resources. Economical concepts and principles presented are the time value of money, infla- tion, societal costs, total life cycle costs and internal rate of return. These concepts are general ones and not restricted to energy systems. Regarding energy the chapter presents the levelized cost of energy procedure and introduces a convenient method of estimating the energy return on energy investment of technologies for conservation measures and generation of energy. Chapter 3 presents the wind energy resource. The chapter begins by discussing controversial issues about wind energy such as noise and environmental impacts. A short review of the history of wind energy technology is presented. The chapter covers the wind characteristics, distributions, wind speed profiles and the wind speed probability profiles. Also, the chapter describes the wind turbine performance and calculations in a detailed manner. The control schemes have been reviewed and both cost issues and wind farms have been discussed. Chapter 4 presents the biomass renewable energy resources in the form of wastes or energy crops. The size of this resource and properties are given in the first part. Different methods to convert biomass to gaseous fuels have been discussed such as anaerobic digestion and thermal gasification. Different transportation fuels from biomass, such as ethanol, methanol, alcohols, etc., have been presented in another part. The last part of this chapter covers different methods for conversion biomass to electricity such as direct combustion. Chapter 5 presents the fundamentals of solar radiation by considering the fundamentals of thermal radiation, solar time and angles, solar radiation calculations based on analytical models or measured data, measurement of solar radiation and measure- ment devices. Chapter 6 covers the photovoltaic conversion principle. The chapter starts by describing the physical aspects of these conver- sion devices by illustrating the behavior of semiconductors, p–n junctions and the photovoltaic effect. The performances of photo- voltaic cells have been presented in details and their design has been described. Special attention has been given to these cells Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Energy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/energy doi:10.1016/j.energy.2011.01.055 Energy 36 (2011) 3613–3614