A Brief History of Energy

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A Brief History of Energy
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Early Days in the Energy Business

• How has the EnergyHuman 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
  systemsthere 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.

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Early Times Sources of Energy
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Characteristic of early energy

• It was almost all local
• It was almost entirely renewable
• Would sustain a limited population indefinitely.

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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.
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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 systems
  capacity to cope with the consequences of so much
  combustion.

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The Age of Capital Steam
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The Progress of Energy 2


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

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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.

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