The Population of Mechanical Iron Slaves

The tendency of early 20th century writers to equate machines with slaves was disturbing. Here’s one characteristic example from A History of Commerce (1907). Clive Day writes:

A simple operation in arithmetic will show the amount of work, in human equivalent, now done by steam. Taking, for example, a modern country, Germany, we find engaged in industry and transportation slightly over ten million people, while we find engaged beside them another population of mechanical iron slaves (steam-engines), variously estimated as equivalent to one hundred to two hundred and fifty million people. These slaves cost for food (coal), attendance, doctor’s bills (repairs), and burial expenses (including the cost of replacing them once in twenty-five years), only about $2.50 a year apiece.

Burial expenses? Doctor’s bills? In this passage, machines are actually an army of slave-ghosts, two hundred fifty million of them, laboring side by side with their human counterparts, fed by fossilized sunbeams.

Which actually rhymes with the real history of industrialization. As coal power grew through the 19th century, powering textile manufacturing, it created enormous demand for cotton. And you know who grew and picked cotton? Millions of actual slaves — and later poor sharecroppers — who created the raw materials which coal-fired industries turned into products.

 

Histories of Steam and Capital

I’ve added a bunch of new resources to the “Steam” reading list, drawn from Google Books’ excellent scans of a series of histories from the early 19th century through the early 20th.

In particular, I’d draw your attention to the biography of Watt, who everyone knows, and Boulton, who far less people know. Watt made the steam engine work, but Boulton put up the money and built the business model — leasing their machines to coal miners — that allowed it to prosper. Boulton was part of the Lunar Society, which was a group of scientific thinkers that modern day investors like Andy Kessler want to claim as their forbears.

I’m interested in all this because the history of green tech is lousy with inventors who built prototypes, mockups, designs, pilot plants, or otherwise showed their ideas would work, but who never got the funding they needed. One type of money seems particularly lacking: commercialization capital, like what Silicon Valley provides today. The investors take on tons of technological risk knowing that if it works, there will be a market (i.e., if you can make ultracheap electricity, people will buy it). Just a flag to keep an eye on that part of the social history of green technology.

Image: CC/Chris Allen. “Grazebrook Engine: This is a Boulton & Watt beam blowing engine re-erected on the Dartmouth Circus Roundabout, on the A38(M) in Birmingham, UK.” It was originally built in 1817.

 

What about the C in RE < C?

After a recent discussion with an agent, I’ve been thinking really hard about the narrative arc of Inventing Green. Connecting a bunch of different types of people, technologies, and eras takes time and effort, it turns out. Particularly if at the end of the story, I want to give you something beyond a few dozen amazing anecdotes about the green tech of the past.

I’ve been kicking around a ton of ideas about how to tell this story — and what the takeaways will be. First, I said to myself, “Why am I interested in green tech, not green?” The answer is that “tech” is about progress, disruptive progress, often, but that works within the framework of a society. It’s end point is not (necessarily) a change in consciousness, but an industrial-technological change. In the simplest terms, the apotheosis for green tech is Google’s useful formulation, RE < C, Renewable Energy less expensive than Coal.

That’s important because while the public consciousness can and sure has changed over the last several thousand millenia, I’m not sure I can make the argument that the change in social consciousness precedes technological change. And the history of people trying to direct the public will away from consumption is pretty abysmal.

So, then I started thinking that my green tech story stems from tech. And tech stems from Silicon Valley and the ecosystem of capital and resources that’s developed.

The interesting thing about all the people making the jump from information technology to green technology is that the products in both cases couldn’t be more different. Electrical energy is the most commodity of commodities. It is exactly the same everywhere you plug into an outlet and 99.9% of Americans use it. You’re trying to make a direct replacement of one electrical energy with the same electrical energy just with a different, cleaner backstory. What a challenge! There is no differentiation possible; in fact, any differentiation would be a bad thing because people could not be more used to the awesome simplicity of the electrical outlet.

So what do you do? Well: RE < C. It becomes a cost game. That’s interesting because renewable energy technologies have improved substantially through the years. Some say that the cost of wind power from 1980 to 1990 dropped by 80 percent. It certainly fell from Palmer Putnam’s turbine or Marcellus Jacobs turbines before that. But here’s the problem: those cost drops have been outpaced by fossil fuel efficiency increases. In RE < C, the C hasn’t stayed constant. In fact, despite the inefficiencies and waste that remains, the C-folks have done a remarkable job increasing the efficiency of their means of converting C into KWh.

One historian shows that the maximum power output of a steam turbine skyrocketing from 4 kilowatts in 1885 to 5000 kilowatts in 1910. Try keeping pace with a 1000-fold increase in the total power availability. While wind and solar could do it now, they sure as hell couldn’t do it then. Meanwhile, the amount of steam consumption (directly related to the amount of coal you needed to burn) per kilowatt hour dropped from 200 to 13.2 pounds.

As laid out in a 1918 letter to the New York Times, check out the following numbers for the pounds of coal it was necessary to burn to get one horsepower (1 horsepower is about 3/4 of a kilowatt):

Twenty years ago [1898] a consumption of ten pounds of coal per horse power was not considered excessive; to-day the average will be between five and six pounds, and in the best plants about two and one-half pounds. It is anticipated that… [new] engines are capable of producing one horse power for each pound of coal burned.

In 1933, an economist estimated that on average, throughout the world, 4 pounds of coal were necessary to generate one horsepower-hour of work. (He used that to compute the daily work output of the world per day, which is kind of awesome, so I reproduced that chart to the right.)

Nowadays, a pound of coal produces about a kilowatt-hour of electricity, about 1.35 horsepower-hours. In 1885,  when fossil fuel power plants took dozens of pounds of coal to make a few horsepower, all kinds of people were working on solar and wind machines — because they were damn near competitive with the wonky early steam turbines and engines. But improvements in the thermal efficiency of steam plants drove down the cost of power below what the working renewable technologies of the day could compete with. By deriving more power from the same amount of fuel, fossil fuel electricity generators could offset almost any increase in the cost of fossil fuel, keeping their technology cheaper than renewable alternatives.

A hundred years later, though, that type of efficiency increase had leveled off. As a Power Engineering article stated back in 2002, “In the 20th century, steam turbines became the most powerful electric power generators available, accounting for more than 50 percent of the world’s installed power generation capacity. However, many people, even some power engineering professionals, had come to view steam turbines as a mature technology that would not experience any remarkable achievements in the near future. Indeed, by the late 1980s, the thermal efficiency of new steam turbines had practically stabilized.”

The same article, however, goes on to note that turbine efficiencies might be increasing again because of “new heat-resistant high-chromium-percentage ferritic-class steels” and better “steam path design.” Still, these gains seem likely to be incremental — and certainly nothing like the massive drops in the cost of wind and solar power.

But Vaclav Smil, one of the world’s primary energy analysts, has a nice chart in his Energy at the Crossroads, showing that despite the hopes of industry analyst types, the average efficiency of US generation, after huge increases from 1900-1960, has been stagnant since the early 1960s. He also points out that the average energy content of coal pulled out of the ground is dropping because we’re using lower-quality seams.

Which raises the question, and I don’t have answer to this yet: when was the exact moment when renewable energy started getting cheaper faster than traditional sources were getting cheaper on a kilowatt-hour basis?

The likeliest place to look, it would seem, would be during the 70s energy crisis when coal prices skyrocketed, as seen in the chart below, which the Energy Information Administration adjusted for inflation. My guess is, too, that the rising price led to some increases in efficiency in the burning of coal. The price came back down, so that in 1997, you see the cost of coal right back down where it was pre-70s. This is another tough thing about the RE < C. There are two steps in making energy from fossil fuel, extraction and production. The fuel cost goes up and down, even if RE can get out ahead for a while, C can suddenly plummet. The volatility of the entrenched power production methods makes it really difficult for investors who can suddenly find themselves wiped out. It takes a certain kind of risk-loving investor, a certain kind of disruptive capitalist to make that kind of investment. And I’m not sure they existed until the last 5 or 10 years, post-tech boom.

Anyway, I’m going to be looking for this type of information over the next week or so, mining my burgeoning green tech library. My completely uneducated guess is that 2005 might have been the year when RE costs started falling fast enough to jumpstart investment in that, as opposed to continuing to push down the price of C, as the logic of power pushed money towards the technologies most likely to generate cheaper energy.

 

Solar Towers and Their “Spatial Byproducts”

We read on infranetlab.org about the the solar updraft tower, “a combination of a solar chimney, greenhouse and wind turbine.” Yet another example of an old technology made new, this particular kind of solar machine was first dreamt up in 1903 “by Spanish Colonel Isidoro Cabanyes in the magazine La Energia Electrica.”

The solar tower exploits a very large low-lying greenhouse to create an artificial wind as the air rushes to escape up the enormous chimney at the center of the plant. Regular wind turbines can then convert that energy into electricity.

The power of the turbine depends on the differential between the hot air at the bottom and the cold air at the top of the chimney meaning that the bigger the tower, the more power you can produce, perhaps up to a couple hundred megawatts, if you have a few dozen square kilometers around.

Between Colonel Cabanyes and the present day, we find a few examples of other solar tower designers. Ernest Drucker first began filing patents for solar towers back in 1976 in the wake of the Arab oil embargo that launched a thousand inventions. His design, as you can see below, is a bit different. It has wind turbines all the way up, like a ladder of energy production. (Sadly, the Czech Drucker, “architect, builder, inventor, and entrepreneur” died in Toronto just last December.)

Renewable Energy World notes that the only known prototype was built in 1982 by Schlaich Bergermann in Manzanares, Spain to test out the efficacy of different greenhouse skins.

Sunlight penetrates this membrane, and the solar radiation is converted to heat upon hitting the ground. The air underneath the membrane quickly increases in temperature due to the greenhouse effect and flows towards the chimney, which, through the stack effect, becomes the lowest point of pressure in the system. This continuous airflow spins a turbine located at the base of the chimney.

The greenhouse that collects the energy also works like a regular greenhouse, i.e., plants like being inside of it. Infranetlab takes this as the jumping off point for a fascinating observation:

The prototype solar tower built in the desert, fostered conditions conducive to the growth of plant life. This was due to condensation created at night that enlivened the soil with moisture, essentially transforming the desert into arable land. Not only can these collection areas add water to otherwise unproductive land, the towers could be linked with other programmes. Think of large office or residential towers that have a solar chimney at their core.

The argument here is that an entirely new type of city could come into being the energy source powering it changes. In this context, it seems far fetched at first, but it’s actually an idea with deep roots in the energy  literature. David Nye’s Consuming Power posits that the form of cities has always been driven by the dominant power source in which it was built. Energy and its distribution become the organizing principle for all human environments.

“Steam power,” Nye writes, “made possible a number of new industrial cities in the East.” Not only that, steam powered railroads changed the perception of distance between places. “As trains moved faster, geography seemed to shrink. The space between the new cities was annihilated, reduced to a passing panorama behind plate-glass windows.”

He describes how “in the areas served by canals and railways, the cost of shipping dropped dramatically, expanding what been a local marketplace to continental dimensions. Such communities fundamentally changed in structure because of the enormous increases in horsepower that the steam engine made available. Investment matched the size of the market, concentrating manufacturing and population in the city.”

Think about the modern agribusiness. Without cheap energy that could be run out to the middle of nowhere, it would be impossible to maintain such energy-intensive and people-light farms going. It’s these types of issues that Infranetlab.org seems like it’s going to explore, which is awesome. Who wouldn’t want to read what “a research collective probing the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics” has to say about anything, really?

Via > @Bruce Sterling > InfraNet Lab

 

An Introduction to the Largest Interconnected Machine on Earth

The Department of Energy released a new, by-way-of-introduction report on The Grid, which as you can read below, can “appropriately” be called “an ecosystem.”

Our century-old power grid is the largest interconnected machine on Earth, so massively complex and inextricably linked to human involvement and endeavor that it has alternately (and appropriately) been called an ecosystem. It consists of more than 9,200 electric generating units with more than 1,000,000 megawatts of generating capacity connected to more than 300,000 miles of transmission lines.

Via > Greenbiz

Image: flickr/sjalex

 

Solar Vs. Atomic – 1953

A persistent lesson in green tech history is that, since the advent on the nuclear physics, solar and atomic power advocates have spent a lot of time and resources opposing each other. The atomic power industry clearly had some deeper pockets and won out most of the time. Case-in-point is this article from Popular Mechanics, which makes it sound like solar energy was already late to the party. It’s entitled, “Why Don’t We Have… Sun Power”?

Lloyd Alter, over at Treehugger, pulls a choice quote about how the policy battle of the day was developing.

Its development problems are comparatively simple and its costs but a fraction of the tremendous atomic outlays. Moreover, the world’s supply of usable uranium is definitely limited. Sunlight, however, will last as long as our solar system. It will still be with us long after our last uranium has fissed.

As former Secretary of the Interior, Julius A. Krug remarked, “Congress would do well to appropriate a few hundred million dollars to find new sources of energy.” High on the list he placed the development of power by solar heat.

In fact, many analysts, including Palmer C. Putnam in his report to the Atomic Energy Commission, have recommended solar energy research down through the years.

Via > @sarahrich > Treehugger > ModernMechanix

 

The Naturmensch, America’s Maladapted Urbanite

Every day, I walk through Buena Vista Gardens on my way to Wired. It’s a park, a public space, but most of the young people and almost all of the Americans use it as a cut-through road, to make the long block between 4th and 3rd a little shorter. As you wend through the park, you tend to encounter a few dozen oler Chinese folks, though,doing their morning routines. They workout there, walking its short, cement track, forward and then backward. Outdoor tai chi classes move in rhythm to almost offensively cliche sounding traditional music blasting out of tinny, overmatched little boomboxes. One lady dances with flags, leaping into the air with her red cloth. I assume that’s semaphore. Another man actually shadow swordfights, with a real sword and everything, pantomiming preparations for a war long past.

Each time I see how this city’s Chinese population puts our urban commons to, I’m struck by how maladapted Americans are to living in urban spaces. We still adhere to some unconsciously learned, frontier-derived suburban code about what can happen where. Somehow, we all know the behavioral CC&Rs.

I’m not arguing that Chinese people are somehow essentially “city people,” but rather that the older population clearly learned a different set of regulations about how to use urban, public space. Their children, sadly, don’t seem to have preserved that bit of heritage; I never see anyone under 40 doing tai chi in the park.

There seems to be something peculiar to American culture about the way that we live in cities. That is to say: we don’t know how.

I’ve thought about this for months, but as I was walking through the park, I happened to be reading The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx, and I think he provides some clues to our strange behavior. He quotes José Ortega y Gasset from back in 1930, noting the rise of, “a new kind of man, ‘a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world’:

The world is a civilised one, its inhabitant is not: he does not see the civilisation of the world around him, but he uses it as if it were a natural force. The new man wants his motor-car, and enjoys it, but he believes that it is the spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree. In the depths of his soul he is unaware of the artificial, almost incredible, character of civilisation, and does not extend his enthusiasm for the instruments to the principles which make them possible.

Marx contines, “If his industrial Naturmensch bears a striking resumblance to many Americans we should not be entirely surprised. After all, what modern nation has had a history as encouraging to the illusion that its material well-being is, in Ortega’s phrase, “the spontaneous fruit of the Edenic tree.’”

In some ways, I think this is right on. Particularly about not seeing the civilization around us. We locate our infrastructure far from our people and forget about it.

But Ortega y Gasset misses a key poin about the Naturmensch: if she doesn’t understand the principles, the underlying structures of our civilization, she can’t make changes to them. She can use the products as naturally as fruit, but only in the way their makers intended. Without deeper knowledge about the technics of the world, she can only use its products, not make new products or change the ones that she receives.

That’s the challenge for Inventing Green — to be an instrument for seeing the energy-intensive civilization that surrounds us. When I say this, I don’t mean simply showing you a carbon footprint or something. I mean narrating how the automobile industry solidifed around the petroleum-fueled internal combustion engine. And how the high speeds it allowed changed the nature of The Road, allowing rural folks and city dwellers unprecedented long-distance mobility, but foreclosing other possibilties for using paved ground.

Because one day, having had The City built for them, the children wake up to find that they can’t live in it. They are unaware of how to inhabit it. Give the maladapted city-dweller a cement-paved park and he sees a road.

But they don’t know how to live anywhere else, either. The City is their home. So they go to the “natural” and private preserves purpose-designed and with instructions included. And that’s where they live, leaving the real city to the cars and the old Chinese people doing tai chi.

[Tai chi at Yerba Buena; these are not the people I see all the time. Later crowd. Image: flickr/TheOtherMattM]

 

Distributing Food on the Multiuse Roads of 1903 New York

Here’s a look at a food distribution system from 1903, as filmed by Thomas Edison. This market is thought to have been on New York’s lower east side, where more than 1,500 pushcart vendors plied their wares to a largely Jewish community.

“The precise location is difficult to ascertain, but it is certainly on the Lower East Side, probably on or near Hester Street, which at the turn of the century was the center of commerce for New York’s Jewish ghetto,” the Library of Congress archival note explains. “Located south of Houston Street and east of the Bowery, the ghetto population was predominantly Russian, but included immigrants from Austria, Germany, Rumania and Turkey.”

These pushcarts — and the small businesses they represented — were important users of the city’s road infrastructure, which would be almost unimaginable today, where they’d be routinely run over.  But back in 1903, there were a lot of different vehicles all sharing the same flat, urban surfaces. Cars couldn’t go much faster than 10 miles an hour and they shared the roads with not just the push carts, but all types of carriages, bicycles, and horses. And what small number of cars there were didn’t all depend on the internal combustion engine as we’ve come to know and love/hate it. A third were powered by steam, another third by huge electric batteries, and the last third by liquid fuels.

In later years, faster gasoline-powered cars pushed all other uses of the streets firmly to the side(walks). Changing the energy source for our wheeled vehicles changed the human possibilities for exploiting the city infrastructure.

Here’s a New York cab run by the Electric Vehicle Company circa 1901. And a lady.

Image: National Motor Museum Beaulieu, via Manel Debes

 

Chinese Power Generation Growth 2002-2008

The non-2008 growth rates are why people like Michael Shellenberger tell a certain tech magazine things like, “”If China burns all the coal that it is set to burn between now and 2050, we are super-deeply fucked.” The 2008 growth rate is why people like the environmental economist, Alan Randall, say things like, “These are not ordinary times, but there is a silver lining – recessions tend to be good for the environment.”

This data is coming out of Richard K. Morse’s group at Stanford, who told the New York Time’s Andy Revkin that even though China “had seen slowdowns in the growth in electricity supplies recently, often because of shortages of coal or the ability to get the fuel where it was needed,” the jump off the cliff beginning “in the last few months is new.”

Via > Andy Revkin’s DotEarth
Image Credit: Richard K. Morse, Stanford University. Data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics

 

Our Plundered Planet and Ecoapocaltyptophilia

Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet is a scathing critique of humans relationship with Nature written in 1947. It strikes me as remarkably in-tune with early-21st century ecoapocalyptophilia.

Osborn beat the rest of us to talking about the world’s new human-centered geological era by a good four decades.  The third chapter of his book is titled, “The New Geologic Force: Man,” and it focuses on the truly global reach of humankind. As the inside flap puts it, “This book demonstrates brilliantly and unsparingly that we are following a course which one day may render our good earth as dead as the moon.”

Note that in the wake of the horror and suffering of World War II, Osborn raises the possibility humans could actually kill of all life on the planet, not just themselves. We could antiterraform the planet.

The impulse to write this book came towards the end of the Second World War. It seemed to me, during those days, that mankind was involved in two major conflicts — not only in the one that was in every headline, on every radio, in the minds, in the hearts and in the sufferings of people the world over… This other world-wide war, still continuing, is bringing more widespread distress to the human race than any that has resulted from armed conflict. It contains potentialities of ultimate disaster greater even than would follow the misuse of atomic power. This other war is man’s conflict with nature.

Osborn, writing at the very beginning of the post-WWII revolution in energy and materials use, began to glimpse the global — not just local or regional — impact that humans had begun to have on the Earth.

“…now, with isolated and inconsequential exceptions, there are no fresh lands anywhere. Never before in man’s history has this been the case,” he writes.

And that, unlike local agriculture, which did transform the globe a bit at at time, modern systems of commerce and distribution linked each and every plot of land and person.

“Further, due to the existence today of world-wide systems of commerce, combined with new and so-called higher standards of living, all nations are dependent upon others in varying degrees for products, materials or goods that have become a necessary part of everyday living for most of hte people on the face of the earth.”