Preface

Joule and Kelvin's introduction of the concept of energy in the middle of the nineteenth century sets the stage for the Second Industrial Revolution. The Revolution has been powered by fossil fuels, a form of stock energy that is rich in potential of entropy growth. The same richness in potential that makes it so useful, however, is the cause for high heat or *CO*2 production in association with rich entropy growth, the unchecked accumulation of which, today, poses an existential threat to mankind on Earth. Cognizant of this fact, the worldwide communities have come to embrace the imperative for a twenty-first century transition from stock energy to renewable energy. This book aims to serve as a platform for scientists or engineers to disseminate their original research findings and their scholarship on development or literature review, as well as their perspectives on renewable energy.

A few preliminary words on energy and exergy: exergy, also known as available energy (one form of which is Gibbs free energy), is a concept derived from energy and entropy. Thermodynamically speaking, usefulness of energy can only be understood in terms of its exergy content: energies of low exergetic content are of little value. One cannot talk about energy without the language of exergy.

The theme of the book is that one cannot talk about energy's impact on our physical world without the language of both exergy and entropy, including the dual nature of the latter, and that understanding this dual nature is the key for order creation in the renewable energy era. The dual nature of entropy was demonstrated in a book (*A Treatise of Heat and Energy*, Dec. 7, 2019, Springer ISSN 0941-5122) in terms of the entropy principle as entropy growth selection principle and entropy-growth-potential (EGP) causal principle. This has bearing on one of the great scientific mysteries: how could life have evolved if the alleged tendency of the universe is to increase entropy until the universe heat death (Schrödinger's paradox)? A recent paper on progress in entropy principle (*Progress in Entropy Principle, as Disclosed by Nine Schools of Thermodynamics, and Its Ecological Implication* | IIETA) argues the dialectic case that whereas entropy principle as selection principle has been conventionally associated with inevitable increase of disorder, the principle as causal principle offers the explanatory framework for the emergence of orders of both technological kinds and biological kinds.

In addition to the audacious argument in favor of an entropy-order-emergence link, anecdotal evidence may also be found in Google Trends, as shown in **Figure 1**, for

#### **Figure 1.**

*Google Trends of renewable energy (in yellow), entropy (in red), and exergy (in blue) from May 17, 2015, to May 12, 2020 (accessed May 12, 2020).*

natural affinity between inquisitiveness in entropy thinking, rather than in terms of exergy solely, and interest in renewable energy phenomena.

As architect James Wines wrote in 2008 Britannica Book of the Year, "The ultimate success of green architecture is likely to require that advocates achieve a broadbased philosophical accord and provide the same kind of persuasive catalyst for change that the Industrial Revolution offered in the 19th century." The same can be said about the transition from fossil fuel energy to renewable energy. The book and the author(s) of each book chapter are a small part of the collective "it takes a village" endeavor toward a post-industrial ecological revolution.

> **Lin-Shu Wang** Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, USA

> > **Wenping Cao** Anhui University, China

**Shu-Bo Hu** Dalian University of Technology, China Section 1
