Exploring the history of sustainable energy

Introduction: sustainable energy’s complex past

History, as H.G. Wells said, is “becoming a race between educa- Coal will undoubtedly be tion and catastrophe.” Nothing could better illustrate that concept than the history of sustainable energy and the transition away from fossil Motivations for sustainable energy: used up. What will industry fuels. This project involved a semester-long exploration of the history • Guard against shortages of coal or oil in the 19th and 20th do then... ? of solar, wind, water power and biological energy systems in a Unity College humanities class (HU2023). centuries; ...One must not believe, We found that sustainable energy sources were primary for most of human history, and haved remained important. Today, more people • Put the sun into service for humankind despite the silence of mod- on earth still rely on firewood than on nuclear power, and the most important energy crisis for most people involves finding simple sustain- • Help civilization live within energy “income” instead of from ern writings, that the idea of able energy solutions. But industrialized nations have also begun to confront the limits of reliance on coal, oil and gas, and the dangers of energy “capital;” using solar heat for mechan- nuclear power. Solar energy, along with wind and water power, and bio-energy, • Fight the political power of the coal and oil companies; ical operations is recent. On are now considered the most hopeful prospects for powering a techno- logical civilization without further damaging the environment. • Provide an alternative to nuclear energy; the contrary, one must rec- However, that hope can’t be complete without an understanding of the historical perspective. History involves focused thinking about • Promote national energy independence; ognize that this idea is very the past in order to understand the present and the prospects for the future. History allows us to ask basic questions about the nature, di- • Increase employment with green jobs; ancient. rection and control of technology and the social and ethical issues sur- rounding its development. • Decrease pollution from fossil fuels; Perhaps the biggest surprise in the history of sustainable energy -- Augustine Mouchot, 1878 is that a subject this interesting and significant has been neglected for so • Recently: Averting climate catastrophe by replacing fossil Solar energy demonstration, Paris, August 6, 1882, -- With coal shortages looming and forests unable to keep up with energy demand, long. Augustin Mouchot and Abel Pifre demonstrate a 3.3 meter silver plated conical solar steam generator. The steam feeds into a Rankine en- Sustainable energy’s past is full of heroic characters, insights into fuels. gine and then runs a printing press inside the tent. A variety of solar cookers showed more ways to use solar power. ( Le Monde Illustré, the human prospect and hope for the future. Aug. 12, 1882). Solar energy Wind energy

Passive solar energy has used in many cultures Solar thermal energy, sometimes called “active” Wind power was developed in starting around the 11th century, ac- since the earliest times. For most cultures in the pre-industri- solar, has been used since ancient times. For example, in ancient coding to one theory by returning Crusaders who had seen windmills in Persia. Wind- al world, buildings were built to be shielded from sunlight in the Rome around the 7th century BCE, polished brass mirrors fo- mills were used for grinding grain, pumping water, sawing wood, fulling cloth and other warm seasons and to trap solar heat in the cold seasons. Knowl- cused solar heat on torches that started the Vestal fires every year. early modern industrial uses. reflects the way social factors influence sustainable edge of the sun was so important in ancient Greece that, in Aeschy- In 212 BCE, legend has it that brass mirrors were used by the The earliest windmills were the post mill type (right), so called because they sat on a A tale of two wind turbines energy development. Both turbines were one-megawatt grid-tied structures. The blue two-bladed lus’ 456 BCE play, Prometheus uses knowledge of solar energy to mathematician Archemedes to defend the city of Syracuse (right). post so they could be easily turned into the wind or moved to other locations. Later mills turbine (smaller, to the right) was built by NASA and Department of Energy at a cost of $50 million distinguish civilized people from barbarians. In the early modern era, scientists Horace de Sassure, John included the “smock” mill because the moveable cap at the top looks like a farmer’s smock in 1979. The red and white turbine was built by volunteers at the Tvind school in in 1975 Solar architecture was more or less forgotten until the in- Hirschel and Claude Pouillet began experiments to find the solar (shirt); the “polder” mill which pumped water in the Netherlands; and “tower” mills which at a cost of $500,000. Tvind students and teachers hoped to show an alternative to nuclear power. dustrial age. American architect George Fred Keck’s House of To- constant. Much of their work comes together around experiments used brick and mortar towers and moveable caps like smock mills. They tied their own reinforcing steel, mixed their own concrete, and created their own factory to morrow for the 1933 Chicago World Fair Century of Progress Ex- of Augustin Mouchot, a French physics teacher who started mak- Windmills loom large in history. Edward III rallied English troops around the wind- cast fiberglass blades. This sort of project is not unusual in the Danish “handverk” tradition, and has position saw the beginning of a comeback. The exhibition house ing solar cookers and devices mill at the Battle of Crecy in 1345. Miguel de Cervantes had his mad knight, Don Quixote, contributed to the succss of Denmark’s wind industry. While the NASA turbine failed and was taken had twelve sides made almost completely out of glass. When Keck noticed that workers were comfortable in just in the 1860 - 1880s, such as fight them . Longfellow wrote poems about windmills. And the Moulon Rouge, the most down in 1981, the Tvind turbine is still running and can be found on Google Earth. shirts inside the House of Tomorrow, lacking a heating system, on a below freezing day, he found that sunlight the solar printing press (above). Another 19th century pioneer was John famous dance hall of Paris, is of course the “red windmill.” passing through glass could be used to heat homes. After this discovery, Keck continued to design other solar Ericsson, a Swedish naval engineer who moved to America in the 1840s. houses with south-facing windows. Erisson designed the USS Monitor during the Civil War, and spent the Wind electric The idea of using wind to gen- matically operated wind turbine generator which charged the home’s The Massachusetts Institute of Technology led the way in experimenting with passive solar architecture in next 25 years working on solar collectors and engines in New York City. erate electricity occurred to many people in the late 19th cen- batteries and lasted 20 years. the . In 1939, Solar One, the first of six solar houses built by MIT, was completed. In Europe, the con- Some of Mouchot’s work was carried on by Father Gomez Himalaya, tury, including British mathematician and physicist William Another wind electric pioneer was Paul la Cour of Denmark, Unity’s White House solar collectors cept of energy efficiency building standards came to fruition by Bo Adamson and Wolfgang Feist starting in 1988 a Portuguese priest and physics professor, who brought his “pyrohelio- Thompson (Lord Kelvin). Like the solar pioneers, Thompson who built his first experimental wind turbine in 1891 at the Askov Folk During the 1970s, America faced an energy crisis due to the under the name of Passive House, or Passivhaus. pher” to the 1904 St. Louis worried about the finite nature of coal reserves. Once coal be- High School. La Cour was motived by the need to to promote self-suffi- Middle East oil embargo. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter com- fair (above left). Similar so- gan to run out, wind power would be ciency, decentralization and cooperative work pared this to the “Moral Equivalent of War”. In his speech, Carter “utilized everywhere as the servant of in rural areas. He also worked on ways to store Solar photovoltaics Edmond Becquerel and Charles lar steam engines were also wanted to reduce the America’s dependency on oil imports. He Fritts were the first to develop a photovoltaic cell in the mid 1800’s. Gerald Pearson, pumping water in the arid man, free for every one, working si- up wind energy through hydrogen electroly- wanted to establish energy policies and the Department of En- Daryl Chapin and Cslvin Fuller of Bell Labs made the first working PV device i 1954 west around this same time, lently as a great force while the world sis and made improvements to small wind ergy. He encouraged Americans to reduce the amount of energy (left). Solar PV was widely used in the space race between the United States and where Aubrey Enias and sleeps,” he said. systems that would late become part of the that they use. President Carter was well known for turning down the Soviet Union. Hanz Zeigler, a German scientist working for the U.S., advocated This Danish smock mill, originally built in 1842, was taken Frank Willsie faced increasing competition from cheap oil. apart and re-assembled in Elk Horn, Iowa, in the 1980s. It is Electrical inventor Charles Brush development of large scale wind turbines in the thermostat in the White House and wearing a sweater. for the use of solar PV on the first U.S. satellite, the Vanguard 1. The satellite was built a large multi-vaned wind elec- Denmark. Another important milestone in launched into orbit powered by chemical batteries and solar energy and within two American inventor Frank Schuman created one of the larg- an advanced type of mill; notice the louvered sails that can In 1979, President Carter purchased and installed 32 solar tric turbine (left) in Cleveland, Ohio, wind power engineering was the 1941 Smith weeks the chemical batteries had died and the solar PV continued to function for 60 est solar thermal installations in history around 1912 in Maadi, be easily controlled from the deck at the bottom of the mill. thermal panels on the White House to set an example about other sources of energy. The panels years or more. Egypt, using parabolic trough collectors (right). They powered a Also there is a wind vane at the back that turns a gear to hold in 1888. It was the world’s first auto- Putnam turbine built on Grandpa’s Knob in were on the White House until in 1986 when President Reagan took them down quietly while the the sails steadily into the wind. The high early 60–70 hp engine that pumped more than 22,000 litres of water per Vermont. White House was under renovation.

price of solar cells re- minute from the Nile River to irrigate nearby cotton fields. World War I and cheap oil interrupted the devel- In 1992, the solar thermal panels were rescued from a government warehouse and taken to sulted in the technol- ogy being used for opment of solar thermal energy. Even so, Shuman said: “We have proved the commercial profit of sun power Maine. The panels were cleaned up in Unity College and half of them were installed on the roof of remote applications, in the tropics and have more particularly proved that after our stores of oil and coal are exhausted the human Water power & Hydroelectric energy the college’s dining hall. The panels provided hot water to the college’s cafeteria until 2005. The pan- such as to power lighthouses, buoys, and warning lights on oil race can receive unlimited power from the rays of the sun.” els were then donated to museums across the country. There is still one panel on display in front of refineries. in the 1970s, Elliot Berman was able to reduce the A solar furnace, built in Odeillo France in 1970, reaches temperatures up to 3,500 °C (6,330 °F). And the cafeteria. price of solar using thin-film technology. This led to a rapid ex- solar “power towers,” which collect solar energy from arrays of mirrors, have been built in Germany, Spain, were well known in the an- begins in the United States in Appleton, Wis- pansion of the technology. France and California in recent decades. Because the mirrors often have to be computerized for solar track- Water mills Hydroelectric power Solar PV technology is now a large commercial market cient world from at least as early as 200 BCE. They ing, these units tend to be more expensive than parabolic thermal units (like Shuman’s, above) or distributed consin in 1882. Within 10 years, there were 200 hydroelectric plants in the United States with an array installed every four minutes in the United States. It were used in as well as Greece and Rome. alone, and by 1920 40% of the electricity in the US was hydroelectric. Many hydro dams is the fastest growing energy source in the market. roof-mounted solar photovoltaic systems. First century Roman engineer Vitruvius was among were constructed throughout this time; most notably the Hoover Dam (originally known the first to write a full description of the water mill. as the Boulder Dam). At the time of construction, the Hoover Dam employed more than Greek writer Antipater of Thessalonica noted an 20,000 workers during the great depression and produced more electricity than any other early water mill in a poem written around 20 BCE. hydroelectric source, but it was outdone 6 years later by the Grand Coulee Dam and by Bioenergy Vitruvius was a Roman engineer who lived during several other dams since. the first century BC. In 31 AD a Chinese engineer, Du Shi, invented water powered bellows. It was a In the 1940’s hydropower provided about 75 percent of all the electricity consumed Wood is the oldest energy, and possible instances of con- “The fuel of the future is are the main liquid bio- complex machine that was used to help forge cast iron. in the West and Pacific Northwest, and about one third of the total United States’ electrical going to come from fruit Biodiesel and ethanol trolled fire are dated to 1.5 million years ago. Today, wood fuels ac- fuels in use today. Biodiesel is made from vegetable oils. Ethanol can The two basic types of water mills are: small horizontal wheels, also called “Norse” energy. Today, the United States has over 2500 hydroelectric power plants regulated by count for two thirds of all energy use in , nearly one third in like that sumach out by mills; and larger, vertical mills, used for collecting grain taxes during feudal period in FERC or the federal government, which supply 49% of its renewable energy. the road, or from apples, be made from starchy or sugary crops or from plant fibers (cellulose) Although hydropower has no air quality impacts, construction and operation of hy- , and one fifth in . Rural areas are almost totally weeds, awdust — almost through a process that is somewhat more expensive but environmental- Northern Europe. Vertical water mills were common in the Middle Ages, and by the Do- dependent on wood and other biomass fuels. anything,” he said. “There ly better than corn ethanol. Vegetable oils can be used in diesel engines, mesday Book census of 1086, over 6,000 mills had been built in alone. dropower dams can significantly affect indiginous peoples, natural river systems and fish Some of the first improvements in the use of wood include is fuel in every bit of veg- In the Islamic world, watermills were used industrially since the 7th century. By the as Rudolph Diesel demonstrated in 1900, but they need to be treated to and wildlife populations. Often, water at the bottom of the lake created by a dam is inhos- About the authors Benjamin Franklin’s cast iron stove, introduced in 1741, and anoth- etable matter that can be 9th century vertical and horizontal wheeled mills were used commonly. Several different pitable to fish because it is much colder and oxygen-poor compared with water at the top. (Alphabetically): Andrew Berberian, Jalen Babin, Kaitlyn Berwick, Robert Crawford, Joel De- fermented. There’s enough blend with petroleum diesel. Ethanol can be blended with gasoline and er Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) introduced in the 1790s. types of mills were used including gristmills, hullers, paper mills, saw mills, steel mills, When this colder, oxygen-poor water is released into the river, it can kill fish living void, Grainne Dougherty, Sierra Ferland, Sylvester Gervasio, Morticia Goodell, Joshua Gold- Low-cost cook stoves for developing countries are now being used alcohol in one year’s yield is useful in boosting octane, as Henry Ford and many other automotive stamp mills and sugar mills. In the 11th century every province in the area was running of an acre of potatoes downstream that are accustomed to warmer, oxygen-rich water. Also, some dams withhold wowsky, Bill Kovarik, Michelle Lewis, Dakota Quenneville, Alexandra Smith, Jamie Thody, for efficiency and cutting pollution, and are often a better cultural pioneers found in the early 1900s. Alexander Graham Bell called etha- to drive the machinery water mills. There were two methods created by Muslim engineers to make waterwheels water and then release it all at once, causing the river downstream to suddenly flood. This Ivy Thurber, Taylor Waning, Rachel Waugh, Kyle Williams, Julie Wheeler-Luna, Gina Zarozny. fit than solar cookers. The growing need for wood energy, and the nol a “wonderfully clean burning fuel,” in a 1917 National Geographic more efficient. They built the wheels onto bridges to harness a more heavy water flow. They necessary to cultivate the action can disrupt plant and wildlife habitats and affect drinking water supplies. Dams can exhaustion of forest resources, led to the Green Belt movement in fields for a hundred years.” article. Other possible biofuels fuels include jatropha, a desert shrub also put waterwheels on the sides of ships. Mills became increasingly popular in Europe A pdf of “Exploring the history of sustainable energy” will be available for future Unity students and -- Henry Ford, 1925 also localize disease and distrupt indiginous cultures. Kenya, starting in 1977. that produces berries that can be used in biodiesel and sustainable during the 11th century, in part due to a change in climate, which allowed more grain to classes at http://www.environmentalhistory.org. aviation fuels. be grown, and more mills were needed.

Sustainable Energy Timeline -

Solar-orientedWood homes shortages Watershift mills common in Archemedes solarWood ray shortages lead to First controlled fire Water mills support Windfeudal mills system begin to appearWind & in water Europe mills showCoal rapid widely im -usedCervantes in England, writes Franklin Don Quixote stovede Saussure invented solar Wood experiments gas lights ParisFirst internalhotel; combustionEdmond Becquerel engine Augustin discovers Mouchot John begins Ericsson solar energy beginsFirst hydroelectricsolar engineSolar printinglight, Niagara pressAermoter demonstrationFalls wind engineWind in company electricSolar experiments water heaters beginRudolph go in on Diesel sale inAubrey shows Cali- vegetable Eneas’Henry Solar oils MotorWillsie Co. develops USsells Congress thermal repeals storFrank tax Schuman on ethanol buildsHenry as solar Ford power backsAgrol renewable ethanol energy plantMIT built Solar in House Kansas;Putnam #1 built wind turbineSolar PV built cells inSatellites -VT Bell Labs use solarSolar PV furnace, powerFirst Odiello, embargo FranceGreen ends Beltcheap movement,Tvind oil wind Kenya Solarturbine panels built,First installed Denmark US wind at White farms, House Vermont,Solar pv Texas now effectiveBruntland for Commission remoteFirst uses offshore backs windEarth farm, Summit Denmark @ Rio:White Sustainable House solar developEnergiewende collectors- to Unity beginsUN focusin Germany is onCourt Sustainable says EPACost development has of solarto regulate PV power CO2 around 36 c / KW civilization westwardAsia, MediterrenianSun lights Rome’s defendsVestal fires Syracuse more solar in Rome Solar panels removed fromWhite House provements, dawn of industrialaccelerating era industrial revolution begin search forBritish the solar begin constant use usesof coal biofuel gas blendphotovoltaic in Connecticut (PV)experiments effect & developmentexperiments in Francein New York CityParis, Augustinfounded, Mouchot, Chicago Abel PifreDenmark withfornia, Paul FloridaLa Cour can run diesel enginefirst waterat Paris pumpingage exhibit system engine, for solarCaliforniafuel in to Arizona help competition plant in Egypt against oilfarm movement makes( Chemurgy synthetic ) rubber in WWII sustainable development ment needed for earth’s future

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