A Brief History of Energy

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.
Early Times: Sources of Energy
The Age of Capital: Steam
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
Capital starts to replace labor
The Progression
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.
The Age of Capital: Steam
The Progress of Energy 2




The Industrial 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
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.
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.