Electricity

The coal age brought us great progress.

It took the invention of the closed oven to get rooms halfway decently warn in cold Bavaria. In the farmhouses of Bavaria (Bauernhofmuseum), hearths and tiled stoves replaced the “smoke ball” rather late (in some places as late as the 19th century). Said smoke ball was an open fire where people heated the rooms and cooked their meals and the smoke was just allowed to climb up through the (not quite leakproof) roof. You can see an example at Markus Wasmeier’s Bauernhofmuseum.

Soon afterwards, the steam engine was invented. Firstly, it was used as a stationary source of energy in new factories. The energy transfer from the steam engine to the work places was done mechanically through transmission belts. They were artfully linked throughout the factory building.

The steam engine lessened our need of hard physical labour. Soon afterwards, it was also used for transportation, both in ships and locomotives. The stage coach area was over, the rise of the railway began.

For many people, this meant unimaginable mobility.

Fuel was a basic requirement for this development. First, they used firewood, then came coal. Coal and firewood brought us immense progress, but they also brought a „black“ age  – in the truest sense of the word. Because laundry that hung on the clothesline in the back garden hardly ever remained white. And both the buildings and the lungs were black from soot.

Then came the time of crude oil and the combustion motor. Everything improved. The raw materials were burned more thoroughly and the exhaust emissions were filtered. It seemed like we had made great progress. Gas was used more and more frequently to supplement the seemingly so clean new energies.

The only thing they had forgotten was that combustion generates carbon dioxide. Our gigantic burning of fossil raw material during the last century caused the CO2 percentage of the air to climb as it never had in (100?) millions of years.

For us humans with our short history, however, millions of years are an eternity. Walking upright is generally considered the first step towards human development from the ape-like stage. We only learned it about 100,000 years ago. Language and script came a lot later (25,000 to 15,000 years ago). So now we catapulted our world back into primitive times in one century, at least as far as the CO2 percentage in our air is concerned.

Parallel with the steam enging, we got electricity. Initially, electricity was generated chemically. Then they managed to generate electricity mechanically through generators. Electricity might well turn out to be the one thing that can save us in the end. Early on, it was generated with water power, today – as we all know – wind and the sun are also used. Only the invention of electricity makes it possible to do without coal or firewood in order to generate energy.

Water, wind and the sun – those are three natural sources humans have always used for energy. Water and windmills are very old technologies. The windmill near the river is a proverbial thing. In Crete, I drove through the high plateau of the 1,000 windmills. But the energy provided by the sun, too, has always been used in various ways at all times, for instance for conserving food. From my own childhood, I still remember us drying the mushrooms we had found on the window sill in the sun for the winter. It worked very well.

But we humans are stupid. We want unrestricted quantities of energy. Among other things, we want them in order to produce totally senseless things such as aluminium containers and air-conditioning. Thus, we started producing electritity by burning fosile energy in all imaginable quantities. And then we waste it. Since our wastefulness was unlimited, we had to find new sources of energy. Besides using gigantical amounts of fossile fuel in order to generate electricity, we also started using nuclear enegy.

Now that was a deceptive white hope. Nuclear fission was supopsed to provide us with energy without producing carbon dioxide. In the 20th century, the belief in technology knew no limits. The risks and dangers, as well as the hopelessness of ever getting rid of radio-active waste, were ignored in the hope of finding (large) technological solutions in the future. The long-term damage done to our health was also underestimated. On this subject, I very much recommend your reading the interview with Mrs. Dr. Dörte Siedentopf, expert for and practitining doctor in radiology, on “Tschernobyl wütet in den Genen” (Tschernobyl and how it rages in our genes).

We just did it because it seemed to be so cheap way of producing endless amounts of electricity out of nuclear energy. But it is only cheap if you exploit third parties or if you disregard the entire systemic cost.
Nevertheless, electricity remains the only great hope for us if we want to retain some of the achievements of our civilization. None of the alternatives makes sense.

There are probably enough ways to produce electric energy in a sustainable way and in huge quantities. Technology that makes it possible to transport energy in the form of electricity covering great distances will a minimum loss is not that young, either. Isn’t it strange how little use we make of this technology so far? The hundred years we spent using “combustion-based technology” must end very soon, indeed!
In my opinion, this is a really „system relevant“ challenge. Compared to this, a financial crisis seems rather unimportant to me.

RMD

P.S.
I took all pictures from the central media archive Wikimedia Commons.

The copyright is with:
Bock-Dampfmaschine of 1864 – André Karwath Aka
Kanonenofen – Lusitana