A Brief History of Energy

Early Days in the Energy Business How has the Energy—Human relationship changed over time? For most of human history, 95% of human energy went into subsistence It was virtually impossible to support civilization on these early hunting and gathering systems—there was no surplus. You need a surplus to feed all those people who are not farmers: rulers, soldiers, artisans, builders, artists etc. Even in Ancient Egypt, one of the greatest and longest-lasting civilizations, there was only about 5% of food production available to feed all non-farmers.

Early Times: Sources of Energy

Characteristic of early energy It was almost all local It was almost entirely renewable Would sustain a limited population indefinitely.

The Age of Capital: Steam First steam engines used wood; a renewable resource. This broke the “tyranny of labor” and allowed each person to produce much, much more This relied on the harnessing and transmission of energy based on fossil fuels and the transfer of work to the machine Capital starts to replace labor Later, steam engines changed to non-renewable coal because of its much higher thermal efficiency.

We have moved from RENEWABLE energy to FOSSIL (NON-RENEWABLE) ENERGY The Progression This picture of Pittsburgh during a smog attack was taken at Noon! "Hell with the lid off" Pittsburgh in c.19 We have moved from LOCAL sources of energy to IMPORTED sources We have moved from RENEWABLE energy to FOSSIL (NON-RENEWABLE) ENERGY We may be testing our life-support system’s capacity to cope with the consequences of so much combustion.

The Age of Capital: Steam

The Progress of Energy 2

The Industrial Revolution Allowed the massive consumption of resources, attracted people from the land who had to be fed, and gave us the capacity to alter the environment, big time

agricultural revolution, an industrial revolution, and a transport So, instead of an agricultural revolution, an industrial revolution, and a transport revolution. What we have is... A Continuing ENERGY Revolution

The Scope of the Energy Revolution It greatly increased production (output) It greatly increased productivity It greatly increased distribution in terms of speed and volume It allowed the growth of cities so people could work in factories It allowed these same people to be fed.

Thermal Efficiency Most energy is now derived from COMBUSTION You burn something to produce heat to produce motion, steam, transform elements etc. Our efficiency has been in finding more compressed forms of, almost always, fossil energy.

Thermal Compression OIL One railcar of Uranium is equal to 24,000 railcars of coal OIL Atomic Energy and Sub-Atomic Energy Coal Wood

How did this affect our lives? It moved us from farms to towns, and from towns to suburbs. Up to around 1840, the farmer in America could not feed many other people, and could not send perishable goods very far. This limited the ability to feed non-farm population. So, problems of production and distribution kept 90% of us on the land, and most economies were largely local.

How did this affect our lives? Then, once steam came, we could produce more per farmer, and this allowed people to leave the land for the cities. In the cities factories were built around huge steam engines that worked machines—people had to live near those. The railroads allowed us to send the food to the cities rapidly, and reliably. So all these things came together: production, distribution and surplus.