All You Need to Know About U.S. Energy Incentives in Two Graphs

This excellent data comes to us courtesy of the paper, “A half century of US federal government energy incentives:
value, distribution, and policy implications” by economists Roger H. Bezdek and Robert Wendling of Management Information Services. Granted, renewable energy has gotten more backing since 2003, but the overall trends are still good.
Paired with my previous All [...]

Americans Use More Energy in 8 Hours Than All Pre-Farming Humans Did in a Year

“In view of the fact that the earth in its natural state could hardly support more than about ten million food-gatherers, the maximum consumption of energy by humans in preagricultural times probably amounted to no more than the equivalent of about four million tons of coal annually.”
— Harrison Brown, “Energy in Our Future” from the [...]

SERI Archive: 40 Cents a Watt Solar Power by the Year 2000 Or Bust

Document: Advances in Photovoltaics R&D: An Overview [Downloadable PDF]
Authors: L.L. Kazmerski (Larry Kazmerski)
Date: 1981
Notes: Reprinted from the Proceedings of the 16th Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference, Vol. 2. NY: ASME.
Task Number: 1090.00
Abstract: A summary status of the advanced photovoltaics research and development is presented. These technologies cover two broad areas: (1) Thin-film intermediate efficiency (>10%) [...]

Techmix: Space Cargo Droid and Railroad Car

Here we see one of the Russian cargo ships that delivers cargo to the International Space Station being loaded onto a railroad car for delivery to the launch site. Check out the railroad tracks on the green construction floor.
“Russia has been sending Progress robot freighters with cargo to the International Space Station for more than [...]

SERI Archive: Two Forgotten Government Solar Programs That Worked

Document: A Solar Explosion [Downloadable PDF]
Authors: Bruce Baccei
Date: 1981
Notes: Presented at the AS/ISES Sixth Passive Solar Conference, Portland, OR, September 8-12, 1981
Task Number: 1122.20
Abstract: The Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) and the Department of Energy (DOE) Passive Solar Manufactured Buildings and Solar Home Builders Programs are developed much needed cost and performance data on solar [...]

How Tech Gets Adopted: Air Conditioners and iPhones

Question: How many air conditioners were sold in 1947? Answer: 47,000.
By 1953, that number had mushroomed to 1,045,000. In 1970, 6 million units were sold.
This leap is astounding even by iPhone standards. Of course, with each unit installed in a poorly insulated house, the amount of energy that Americans used per capita rose.
In Adam Rome’s [...]

SERI Archive: How Do You Sell Passive Solar to the People?

I’ve returned from Golden, Colorado with a bag full of documents from the early history of the Solar Energy Research Institute, now known as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. None of them are available online, so short of going to Golden, they are exclusively available here on Inventing Green.
I focused my research on the period [...]

Techmix: Color Photo and Old, Russian Workshop

Here we see a workshop from about 1910 in Mother Russia. What’s strange here is that most workshops of this time — complete with steam-era details like the pulleys running down from the ceiling — are photographed in black and white. Black and white photos distance us from the period in which they were taken.
Luckily, [...]

Techmix: HDTV and Old-School Control Panel

Here’s Firing Room Four at NASA’s Launch Control Center in Cape Canaveral. We’ve got HD monitors sitting atop an old-school control panel. In fact, many sophisticated operations centers — nuclear power plants, electric grid hubs, etc — still contain these damn near antique, knobby set-ups.  Technologies are rarely subtracted. More are just added.

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Techmix: Horse Horsepower and Electric Horsepower

Here we see what Low Tech Magazine calls a “hybrid system combining electricity with animal and human power” that operated near Hamburg, Germany from 1912 all the way until 1950.
The trollytrucks assisted horses in climbing a steep hill from the port up to the town, but didn’t replace them.
“The trucks were used as an assisting [...]