When I started writing this book, it seemed so simple. It was a tour through the history of mostly forgotten technologies that have new importance in light of climate change and peak oil concerns.
Many months have gone by since those happy days. I’ve read dozens and dozens of books, scanned technical reports, dug through patent literature, interviewed people. Predictably, it’s become harder and harder to answer the question: “What am I doing?”
As I was contemplating these issues for the introduction to the book, eminent historian Gordon Wood’s The Purpose of the Past, a selection of book reviews over the years, was given to me. It’s an incisive look — dripping with arch archness — at the various ways of studying the past. Not that it’s the most novel insight, but I was struck by how many ways one could encounter and try to understand the past without doing “history,” by Wood’s definition.
Most of the time, Wood’s ire is raised by those who do not want to attempt full descriptions of history, who force the past to fit the politics or who cherrypick from its vastness to suit present ends. In his evocative language:
“Even many of the historians who concede the pastness of the past and investigate ‘the past as a foreign country’ do so primarily as anthropologists or social critics, seeing in the strange ideas of past peoples either alternatives to or object lessons for a present they find oppressive and objectionable…” Woods writes. “So these sorts of unhistorical historians ransack the past for examples of harmonious well-knit communities that today we ought to emulate, or they seek out abuses of patriarchal power in the past that we in the present must avoid.”
With Wood’s narrative voice echoing in my brain, I asked myself: is this what I’m doing? Certainly in the early days of my book researching process, I was ransacking the past and many people who hear about the project seem to think that’s what I’m doing. The most common response to my book is usually something like, “Oh? You’re finding some old solar technology that we should use now?”
I wish there was such a thing, actually, but I don’t think there is. I’m not really fishing for ready-to-deploy technologies of the past. What I am doing, at least nominally, is describing some of the lessons that we can learn from the detours and off-ramps of our history.
Perhaps I’m more like a lawyer looking for precedents that may still make sense, even in an entirely new context. It might not be academic history, but I think it’s an honest way of confronting the past and making it relevant to the present.
Writing the history of (mostly not extant) technologies may make this task easier, actually. What I am most interested in is the fullest set of circumstances that I can build to understand why early electric cars, say, did not succeed in their own time. Unlike working with ideas, where you might want to bring back Jeffersonian republicanism or something, I’m not — nor would anyone — argue that we should bring back the particular instantiation of battery-powered car represented by the Electrobat.
So why study them, then?
Well, Wood suggests that history plays a profound role in knitting together American society through its exploration of how we’ve all come to live in the same place in all its fullness. Because unsuccessful technologies tend to be quickly written over by others, green technologies that were used in the past are rarely acknowledged. Or, instrumentalists use them to bolster their positions. Rare is the person who just tries to say what happened.
“History is important to us, and knowledge of the past can have profound effect on our consciousness, on our sense of ourselves. History is a supremely humanistic discipline: it may not teach us particular lessons, but it does tell us how we might live in the world,” Wood writes.
The reason to recover technological alternatives is that they represent choices not made. Without them, there’s no “honest” record of the decisions that created our current infrastructure and technical reality. And without that — it’s hard to know why we have the world we do.
So, I am ransacking history for technological systems that do not fit the standard progressive narratives that pervade both pop culture and the minds of many historians. My microhistories are selected for their connection to the present, not their importance to contemporaries. On the other hand, I’m trying to bring a historical sense to the project. I don’t expect past actors to approach wave motors with the idea that climate change might some day become a major problem. In fact, the alignments and contrasts through time are exactly what’s interesting.
And, importantly, with a hot field like green technology, the tendency is to become very future-focused. Innovators rush into the field to build new stuff! A change is gonna come! And it’s here where I feel my book could make the biggest difference.
Wood is brilliant and beautiful on how history as a discipline can bring discipline to the wild-eyed discussants trying to figure out the future of energy.
“Unlike sociology or political science, history is a conservative discipline—conservative, of course, not in any contemporary political sense but in the larger sense of inculcating skepticism about people’s ability to manipulate and control purposefully their own destinies. By showing that the best-laid plans of people usually go awry, the study of history tends to dampen youthful enthusiasm and to restrain the can-do, the conquer-the-future spirit that many people have. Historical knowledge takes people off a roller coaster of illusions and disillusions; it levels off emotions and gives people a perspective on what is possible, and, more often, what is not possible. By this definition Americans have had almost no historical sense whatsoever; indeed, such a sense seems almost un-American.”
It’s this sense of historicity (or whatever you might call it) that makes me come to the conclusion that American energy policy can’t bet too much any single energy technology. It’s not that government can’t “pick winners,” it’s that almost no one can.
Images: 1. The failed Smith-Putnam Turbine blade. 2. The 1894 Electrobat with its creators, Morris and Salom, atop the vehicle.
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Is this why Silicon Valley types like to say that no one under 30 can innovate? I know the older I get and the more experience and second-hand historical knowledge I accumulate, the more likely I am to shoot ideas before they even get out of the barn.
Hah. Maybe so. Older innovators seem to have a spidey-sense for where problems will arise.
Thanks for sharing these thoughts. I really like the idea of figuring out why certain things that seem promising didn’t take off in the past; also how good things came about. New technology seems to emerge from a combination of historical development and present needs, and valuable experience may be lost in the process. I’m glad to see that you’re working thoughtfully and honestly to keep it in circulation.
good explanation, thorough approach. Perhaps you could comment on the course the dialogue of sustainability and infrastructure is taking in the profession, specifically through intiatives such as WPA 2.0?
Maybe this youthful futile search is similar to the Deleuzian idea of the “probe head” exploring the available space. Or in the parlance of where I’m from- throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks? The prime metaphor here being EO Wilson’s dandelion which disperses thousands of cheap and easy seeds so that a few might find a niche?
I enjoy your blog Alexis… You’re looking very much like the new Perlin, although your coverage is broader. Magnificent pictures… You get a 10 from me there for sure. That Father Frost picture is priceless.
“Father frost is bringing new year’s gifts to the enemy, from which it is hot in the severe cold, and in the heat, the frost he takes.” It rhymes in Russian. A modern version would go something like: Frost is getting his frost off…
What is your opinion on the history of Grand Energy Plans? My own feeling is that the Grand Plan schpeal is good for publicity but not much more. Mobilizing a pop-science mob will only last as long as the pop in the science lasts. I’m very much looking forward to the future of PV promotion being driven by economic arguments rather than sky pie messages. It’s all well and good to discuss the technical potential of PV but next to none of this can be realized if the economics aren’t sound. For me a five year horizon is all I can handle.
You might consider a blurb on energy forecasting in your book. Smil covers the topic in Energy at The Crossroads. I’ve kept a lookout for forecasts every since reading that book and what I’ve found has really hammered Smil’s point home. Long term forecasting is nearly always wrong. You could have some fun comparing the solar forecasts of the late 70s against the forecasts of the late 90s.
Cheers
Yeah, as you might guess from this post, Grand Energy Plans are only good for temporarily enlarging our sense that something can be done… But then if nothing is, what then?
The next five years in PV and oil will be very interesting. I wish I had more guts to make predictions on these things, but I don’t. Just about everyone’s record in forecasting is terrible, as you note. If you haven’t seen it, take a look at my forecast project, which began with exactly that section from Smil’s book:
http://www.greentechhistory.com/tag/forecastproject/
On the other hand, I think our terrible record of forecasting makes it possible for people to argue for the world they’d like to have rather than the one that is inevitable, according to the spreadsheet. So, that’s something.
I also think that we can take a very basic lesson from the forecasting errors: people overestimate the problems associated with other technologies and underestimate the problems associated with their own. This is true within renewables and fossil fuels as well as between those broad categories.
Thanks for coming by! I should have a lot more up soon. The blog is a little slow now because I’m sprinting on the book itself. And re: Perlin… John is an emerging friend. He’s such a dedicated, thoughtful, careful researcher.
I read through your forecasting section. Entertaining stuff. I’ll shoot over some IEA PV underestimates if I can find them. Their 2000 estimates for 2020 have already been reached.
One thing that’s missing in the forecasting section is something about learning curves – perhaps this is somewhere else on your site. I would suggest reading something by Gregory Nemet on the subject if you haven’t already. Nemet compartamentalizes the learning within different parts of the PV production chain – his conclusions are interesting.
I know it’s foolish to forecast but I’ve been tooling around with an excel spreadsheet that models photovoltaics costs over the next 10 years. It’s a basic model, you pick a growth rate and a learning coefficient and the spreadsheet spits out a number. I thought the 5 year results was reasonable so I added a few more columns that compartmentalized the polysilicon component of costs separately from everything else. The idea being that poly prices could come down more quickly due to oversupply, more FBR poly and Chinese competition – basically correcting the high poly prices of the last few years. Anyways… the results look reasonable and this reinforces my view that the next 5 years of PV will be very interesting.
I look forward to your book.
@MarkEMark: As luck would have it, I just ran across Nemet’s paper, “Beyond the Learning Curve.” Very smart, rigorous, and really interesting stuff. I was sitting there reading it a few seconds ago when I looked at the author and thought, “Huh, wait a second!” So, thanks for the pointer!
It was actually just the sort of thing that I was looking for to make my chapter on forecasting (which precedes my own dumb stab — more utopian than predictive — of what an energy system could look like in 2050) a little less depressing.
Re: your model. Sounds interesting. I, too, agree that PV will be interesting over the next five years but on a different basis. The policy/business innovations like Berkeley’s financing model and the solar services companies look very promising and finally seem to address the kinds of soft costs/hassle that I think are a big part of the problem.
My Internet friend Joel Eisen, too, is working on a new concept for the role government could play in residential solar PV installations that I’d love to share with you when I can.
My model is little more than a toy but I enjoy being one of those “dreary gentlemen who juggle with statistics” who Harper’s complained of so long ago. The Beautiful Possibility was a good read by the way.
Innovative policies have been an essential part of PV’s success but the policy burden is falling fast. We’re seeing that with the FiT reduction in Germany. PV is still a flightless bird in most markets but it’s maturing quickly.
Try playing with the learning curve equation yourself and see what you come up with.
Speaking of bad forecasts.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/u.s.-solar-market-so-promising-except-for-2009/