“The use of wind power is as old as history.”
– Erich Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), p. 62.
“The Federal Power Commission became interested in the Grandpa’s Knob [windpower] experiment during World War II, and commissioned Percy H. Thomas, a senior engineer of the commission, to investigate the potential of wind power production for the entire country. Thomas’ survey, Electric Power from the Wind, was published in March 1945.”
– Wilson Clark, Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974), p. 545.
Last week I posted on the long history of solar energy to make the point that this technology is not an infant industry. The fact that solar cannot compete against grid electricity (off grid is another matter) today is proof positive that there is an inherent disadvantage with the dilute, intermittent flow of sunlight in the thriving carbon-based energy era.…
“Vice President [Al] Gore is wrong to call for the elimination of the internal combustion engine, and wrong again to call ‘absurd’ our current reliance on cars and trucks. Mobility is an essential and inseparable part of almost all that we value—from close-knit families to rewarding careers, quality educations, and fulfilling recreation. Mobility truly is what makes our autonomy possible. And cars, trucks, and the internal combustion engine are worth keeping because they make automobility itself increasingly sustainable.”
– Joseph Bast and Jay Lehr, “The Increasing Sustainability of Cars, Trucks, and the Internal Combustion Engine,” Heartland Institute Policy Study No. 95, June 2000, p. 54.
Part I of this two-part series described the primitive, messy, inefficient prehistory of the mechanized transportation. Today’s post provides quotations form different scholars that describe the great advances provided by carbon-based energy transportation.…
“In an 1878 letter, [John] Ericsson concluded that ‘the fact is . . . that although the heat is obtained for nothing, so extensive, costly, and complex is the concentration apparatus that solar steam is many times more costly than steam produced by burning coal.’”
– Wilson Clark, Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974), p. 364.
Renewable energy, particularly wind and solar, are packaged as “new” and “the energy future.” But on close inspection, as the quotations below will show, these technologies are very old and have had many decades of application.
And as sure as the sun shines, solar and wind fail the economics and product-quality tests as dilute, non-stored, intermittent energy sources. And why amid a boom in fossil fuel supplies–a stock of energy from the sun’s work over the ages–would one chose a far more costly and unreliable energy source from the sun’s weak flow?…