If you think or write about alternative energy now, there is no doubt that you’ve got some Amory Lovins in your DNA. He’s like the Genghis Khan of the alt energy tribe; almost every one of us is sort of a descendent. Hell, he even got made into a comic book character (above) in the short-lived Energy Comics, a story described by its publisher Leonard Rifas in a 2007 paper.

Lovins is the kind of guy people love or hate. At 30, he became perhaps the most influential energy analyst in American history. Of course, when someone gets so spectacularly popular and powerful, their actual words tend to become obscured by what people think of them. They become a very convenient container for a packet of ideas that they may or may not actually hold. And that’s a very sad thing in Amory Lovins’ case because he’s a really fantastic writer and rhetorician.

That’s why it seems a goodly thing to blog my re-reading of his classic 1977 book, Soft Energy Paths. I have the feeling that many Lovins-haters will find themselves agreeing with him if they read his words. Nominal Lovins fans may find the opposite, too.

Three interesting backstory notes about this book before I begin the reading.

• It was published at a time when nuclear power had not ground to a halt in the United States and there was a very real possibility that breeder reactors — those that produce more fissionable material than goes into them — were going to form the backbone of the American energy system. This “plutonium economy” is the real target of the book. It is the hard path.
• The science of climate change was just beginning its long scientific slog towards gradual acceptance. Cutting down carbon dioxide is not part of Lovins’ central arguments.
• The meat of the book — and a famous Foreign Policy paper on which its based — were actually commissioned by Alvin Weinberg. He’s best known as the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and perhaps the greatest believer in nuclear power that ever was. In his 1994 memoir, he recalls that he and Lovins “become good friends, although in my reviews of Amory’s many books, I often attacked him for being so wrong-headed.” He also tells a quick anecdote about Lovins’ influence on American energy policy. The National Research Council ran a $4 million study (CONAES) in the early 1980s of American energy policy. When Weinberg asked the study’s leader who had more influence on U.S. energy policy, the director replied, “Amory, of course.”

The first time I read this book back a couple of years ago, I was mostly skimming it for old projects that I could add to my book. I wasn’t trying to really grapple with his arguments and I didn’t have the contextual knowledge I would have needed, anyway.

I should also say before we begin that I have a complex relationship with Lovins. I love his optimism, what Barbara Ward calls in the foreword, “the great merit” of his work: “he can convince both the citizen and the scientist that, beyond the great energy outburst, survival is not only possible: it may well be more safe and agreeable as well.” But I’m also prone to pessimism like energy researcher Vaclav Smil. Lovins thinks too much can be done too easily. The gains that can be made are more tightly circumscribed by history and habit than Lovins would have you believe. Smil:

My attitude to Lovins’s sermons has not changed during the past 25 years: I have always wholeheartedly agreed with many of his conclusions and ideas and parts of his and my writings, although informed by very different backgrounds are interchangeable. I share his quest for technical rationality, higher conversion efficiencies and reduced environmental impacts. I agree with many of his goals—but not with any of his excessive claims and recurrent exaggerations.

That’s much harsher than my own view of Lovins’ work. It seems to me that he defines the envelope of possibility while Smil sketches more probable but limited paths. Sometimes I feel like the two of them sit on my shoulders whispering in my ears as I work on my book. But neither of them is a devil or an angel, and they both can be useful and wise.

Ok, enough hemming and hawing. The reading will begin shortly. (Because some sections move through different ideas and writing transitions is hard, I’m going to put a little * when I’m changing tack to talk about something else in the book. That way you can also skip down if you’re reading it in pieces.)

*

Page 1. The very first line of the book, the heading of the first section is brilliant: TECHNOLOGY IS THE ANSWER! (BUT WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?). It sets up Lovins’ whole project, which he then quickly defines in opposition to the mainstream view: “The energy problem, according to conventional wisdom, is how to increase energy supplies (especially domestic supplies) to meet projected demands. As population in most industrial countries rises by less than a fifth over the next few decades, we are told that our use of energy must double and our use of electricity treble. Not fulfilling such prophecies, it is claimed, would mean massive unemployment, economic depression, and freezing in the dark.”

This is actually a pretty good statement of affairs. Those levels of energy use increases were, in fact, what analysts and utility executives were projecting with all the smug confidence that comes with a couple of decades of data behind them. It was nearly inconceivable that the situation could change. The U.S. uses about 100 quads of energy a year now. Most predictions from the 70s were more in the 160-190 quad range. (To get an idea for how amazing those projections were, imagine having two power plants for every one we currently have. And two cars for every one on the road, probably, too. And twice as many houses. We may think we live in a sprawled out, McMansion and SUV-loving profligate world, but that’s nothing compared to what those “in the know” were projecting.)

Looking at all these graphs and spreadsheets, Lovins asks, “But where do these ‘projected needs’ come from?” Then he provides a long “pungent” quote from Herman Daly:

Recent growth rates of population and per capita energy use are projected up to some arbitrary, round-numbered date. Whatever technologies are required to produce the projected amount are automatically accepted, along with their social implications, and no thought is given to how long the system can last once the projected levels are attained. Trend is, in effect, elevated to destiny, and history either stops or starts afresh on the bi-millennial year, or the year 2050 or whatever. This approach is unworthy of any organism with a central nervous system, much less a cerebral cortex.

*

Lovins next move is to show that the ability to build the systems to fit these linear projections is “rapidly grinding to a halt.” It was, he said:

• “politically unworkable” because of environmental concerns associated with the extraction of resources and subsequent energy production and use. People who “directly perceive the prohibitive social and environmental costs” of the system greet “these enterprises with a comprehensive lack of enthusiasm.”
• “technically unworkable” because “there is mounting evidence that even the richest and most sophisticated countries lack the skills, industrial capacity and managerial ability to sustain such a rapid expansion.”
• “economically unworkable” because “such free market mechanisms as still operate have persistently shown themselves unwilling to allocate to the extremely capital-intensive, high-risk supply technologies the money needed to build them.”

What’s interesting is that all three of these points are still furiously contested, particularly around nuclear power plants. I’d argue that the technical and economic arguments are stronger right now, as political opposition to many energy technologies comes not from those closest to the environmental costs, but those farthest away. It’s not the Gulf Coast that’s clamoring to stop drilling or even the people closest to nuclear plants that want to stop them from going in.

If you’ve been following the debate on loan guarantees for nuclear power plants, you know that the economic viability of the stations are still in doubt, but really, no one is quite sure how much it will cost to build a new plant in the U.S. or how long it will take. The variations in estimates are themselves even a cause for concern.

Then, here’s a characteristic Lovins reframing that’s just beautiful:

The basic tenet of high-energy projections is that the more enrgy we use, the better off we are. But how much energy we use to accomplish our social goals could instead be considered a measure less of our success than of our failure—just as the amount of traffic we must endure to get where we want to go is a measure not of well-being but rather of our failure to establish a rational settlement pattern.

It’s deceptively simple, but really, this is taking on the entire literature of the power industry from 1900 to, well, now. What was called the “grow-and-build” strategy was the official policy of most utilities, as brilliantly and sympathetically explored by historian Richard Hirsh in his book Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry. In 1944, the chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority held that “the quantity of electrical energy in the hands of people is a modern measure of the people’s command over their resources and the single best measure of their productiveness, their opportunities for industrialization, their potentialities for the future.”

Access to power really is important, and even in 1937, a National Resources Committee, still found it relevant to measure the “power available” to Americans. For most of the country’s history, people had just a couple of horsepower available to them to do work. Now, the power available to them was essentially unlimited.

Engineers thought they were doing some good! They “saw themselves,” this is Hirsh again, “as stewards of technological and social progress who enhanced the public’s welfare.” The National Academy of Engineering voted The Grid as the number one engineering achievement of the 20th century. And for decades, utility executives were able to build bigger and bigger plants while pushing down the kilowatt hour cost for consumers. The way they saw it, their work helped defeat the Nazis and provided the industrial arsenal that held the Soviet menace at bay.

Then here comes this Lovins guy telling them that the amount of power they produce isn’t a measure of their success but of their failure! It is not entirely surprising that he was received with hostility and sometimes downright hatred.

*

Lovins surveys the energy landscape in the post oil embargo world of the mid-70s. What’s happened he says, is that “energy, for so long treated as a free good, can no longer be taken for granted, but will become much more expensive no matter what we do. It must now be economized, much as we have economized on costly labor in the recent past. OPEC oil is a bargain, and except for possibly short-term fluctuations we shall not have large amounts of energy so cheaply again.”

We’ll talk about that statement in a second, but here Lovins slips a second paragraph under the first, pointing out “serious structural problems” in the industrial nations: “centrism, vulnerability, technocracy, repression, alienation, and the stresses and conflicts they bring.” Those “social and political problems” seemed to Lovins “a sufficient reason to seek new approaches to the energy problem.”

Then we get to his famous two paths: “This book is devoted to a comparison of two energy paths that are distinguished ultimately by their antithetical social implications.” And for those that argue that the cold, invisible hand of economics will steer people away from the preferred social path, Lovins responds, “surprisingly, a heroic decision does not seem necessary in this case, because the energy system that seems socially more attractive is also cheaper and easier.”

There’s a lot going on beneath Lovins’ smooth prose. Two different reasons are posited for changing the energy system, and they become entangled in a way that may ultimately by fallacious.

The first reason is hard and inevitable, the “inexorable laws of nature” of declining resource extraction catching up with us. The end of cheap energy had reached its end, Lovins argued. But then it turned out it hadn’t, actually. In 1999, I was driving a Ford Escort ZX2 and paying $0.99 per gallon at the Circle K off Exit 14 on I-5 in Washington State. Everyone forgot about “the end of cheap energy” because they were pumping it into their SUVs.

With oil that cheap and coal prices low, the socially attractive energy scheme he liked wasn’t cheaper and was only debatably easier.

Generally, I’m run into this a lot with the 70s deep energy thinkers. They used rising energy prices as a Trojan horse for all sorts of social and political arguments. Lovins links energy to “centrism, vulnerability, technocracy, repression, alienation” but he leads with the end of cheap energy. It’s stronger to rest on inevitability than political will, I suppose, but when that inevitability turns out to be false, the argument crumbles.

This is something that Lovins might have known from his work deconstructing utility projections. The same types of forecasting errors — or really, just forecasts because they are all wrong — led many environmentalists, Lovins included, to conclude that the era of “cataclysmic wealth” was over. The firmness of their conviction and miss on that score continues to haunt anyone who wants to talk about resource scarcity now. Maybe high oil prices and gas lines were necessary to create a popular movement for energy system change, but in playing the inevitability card, 70s alt energy advocates hurt their chances at being taken seriously 30 years later when similar problems are creeping up on us. The world surprises us and we should take that into consideration when arguing that something must happen. Unfortunately, energy arguments work exactly the opposite way. We might as well begin fights over nuclear power or oil or coal by saying, “May the most inevitable inevitability win.”

In any case, Lovins had a lot going for his social and political arguments without the price of energy stuff. He appealed to mainstream political and social values like democraticization and self-reliance, themes which have resonated with the people of this country down through the centuries. Lovins exposed that lurking within the carefully crafted projections of 7% growth in electricity per year, there was a social argument, an argument about the way America should be. When he rendered the visions of the technocratic utility executives in plain English, and asked his fellow citizens, “Is this what you want?” many of them answered, “Hell no!”

This is just a hypothesis, but it seems to me that any political or social movement to change the way we make and use energy will have to be robust to energy price movements. It will have to be embedded in a firm social sense of where we want the country to go and the development of infrastructure, institutions, laws, and technologies that get us there. I was inspired last night by this grassroots Los Angeles bike lane plan. What I love about it is how tactical the blog post’s author is about what victory will take. He knows that to get a certain amount of pavement marked off for bikers, it’s going to take old-school politics and lobbying over years — and he’s willing to do it because if he wins, his life is enhanced by the infrastructure that he created. This is, to steal a line from The Breakthrough Institute, “the politics of possibility.” Last night, without thinking about it much, I tweeted, “Infrastructural possibility can create political will.” And in the light of morning, I’m excited by that idea anew: build movements around concrete things, like actual concrete formed from cement and gravel, not just firm conviction.

*
Lovins popularized the idea of matching the needs of the end use (say, space heating) with the type of energy input. While in the 19th century, different fuels and machines were used heat, light, and power, the arrival of electricity — sometimes called the “universal power” — began to obscure those differences. Lovins and his ilk brought back the idea with a vengeance. “How much primary energy we use—the fuel we take out of the ground—does not tell us how much energy is delivered at the point of end use (the device that does the kind of work we desire), for that depends on how efficient our energy supply system is.”

This allows Lovins to unlink primary energy use with “well-being.” That’s an incredibly important move, and one that distinguishes him from a lot of other energy people.

It also lets him concentrate on “the conversion and distribution losses that rob us of much delivered end-use energy.” Because so much is lost in conversion and distribution from large facilities, this analysis argues for decentralization of power plants.

It’s true that even the best coal plants, say, only convert 40% of the heat value of the coal they burn into electricity, subtract a few more percent for transmission long-distances and local distribution, and you can see his point. We generate a lot more heat than we get out electricity.

But I’ve always had the intuition that perhaps Lovins’ analysis — and the many identical arguments made down through the years — lets small end-users off the hook while holding the quantifiable large power plants accountable. Again, looking back to the early 20th century, when many people ran their own coal boilers in places like Chicago and Pittsburgh, it was very difficult to get all of them to keep their boilers running efficiently. If they didn’t, the boilers belched out smoke, which called an entire environmental movement into being to fight “the smoke nuisance.”

So not only do you need to get people matching up their energy inputs with their end-uses but you have to bank on them creating efficient systems. You know, we have a system that works like that now: cars. While power plant efficiencies have gone up, fuel efficiency — driven partially by lack of regulation and partially by consumer choices — has been pretty flat since the early 90s.

I’m not saying that’s right, but I am saying that pushing the responsibility for technical efficiency down to rank-and-file consumers may not yield the results that Lovins is after. That type of rationality is not always or even generally a part of consumer behavior.

*

Lovins lists his “worldview” in 12 easy to follow points. Perhaps the most interesting bit is his succinct statement: “the energy problem should not be how to expand supplies to meet the postulated extrapolative needs of a dynamic economy, but rather how to accomplish social goals elegantly with a minimum of energy and effort, meanwhile taking care to preserve the social fabric that not only tolerates but encourages diverse values and lifestyles.”

*

The specter of the nuclear future looms in section 1.4 of the book. “Thus nuclear power, as Walter Patterson puts it, is not a yes-no question, but an either-or question: Do we have it, or do we instead have the other systems with which it competes for our resources?” With the benefit of hindsight, it’s interesting to see that we have neither the hard or soft path. Nuclear power was staggered but softer technologies didn’t replace its proposed contribution; industrial efficiency, coal, natural gas, and oil did. There are a lot of reasons for that (that’s what my book’s about ultimately) but for now, let’s just treat that as a fact. The choice turned out to be neither/nor.

We can also see now that having nuclear power plants running for decades hasn’t destroyed American liberty or anything. It’s hard to even say they are the riskiest power plants operating right now, given the issues with coal.

*

The concrete proposal that gets the most attention in the introduction is the introduction of a Federal fuel tax, which would let us “smoothly anticipate the inevitable price rise rather than having to swallow it all at once later when we are less well prepared for it.” He argues that this is basically a “depletion allowance backwards,” in reference to the tax break given to oil companies for pumping oil. This tax, recently resuggested in various forms, “would work through the economy and be reflected automatically in the price of goods and services in proportion to their direct and indirect energy content.”

Note that this is basically the idea behind a carbon tax, too, but because climate change wasn’t a frontline issue, Lovins goes straight to the heart o the matter: let’s tax fuel use, straight up. The only difference with a carbon tax is that it would provide less disincentives for burning cleaner fuels.

*

Lovins has an interesting quarrel on the evaluation of different types of technologies.

“Technologies that are complex, glamorous, and backed by powerful constituencies are given lavish subsidies, subventions, bailouts, and exemptions from paying their own environmental and social costs, while technologies that are simple mundane and less endowed with wealthy lobbyists are subjects to a far more rigorous set of economic tests and requirements.”

His language here implies that this is obviously nuts and due only to political hackery. But there is a reason that high-tech alternatives are attractive: hope! Early-stage technologies improve in a variety of ways, so it may make sense to throw money at complex technologies like photovoltaics because they could get a lot better faster, eventually opening up new pathways to clean, cheap energy. Well-known technologies using well-known materials cost what they cost. Is it a good idea to deploy them? Sure, if there are economic or environmental reasons, but you can’t expect to get a lot more out of your investment than you put in. There’s no speculative play in the deal.

Take Exxon’s foray into alt energy in the 1970s, the Solar Power Corporation. Along with other researchers, they drove the price of photovoltaics from $100 per watt to about $10 per watt. In so doing, they brought the cost of solar down enough to find an actual marketplace in far-flung locations like oil rigs. It may not have been a large market, but it was big enough to keep companies interested in competing and developing the technologies further. In fact, the cost savings that came in the years following the big cost reductions of the first half the of the 1970s proved to be of a different kind than what Burman was able to do so quickly.

University of California Berkeley energy researcher Gregory Nemet found that the two largest factors in cost cutting between 1975 and 2001 were increases in the efficiency of modules in converting sunlight into electricity and capturing the economies of scale that come with building bigger plants. While scientific research may have continued to improve efficiencies without a market for photovoltaics, the scaling effects were made possible by the deep price drops brought about by the Solar Power Corporation and a select few other companies.

This is the promise of technological development. Advances lead to price drops, which encourage scaling and more research, which leads to more price drops, and so on and so forth.

*

What Lovins is best at is highlighting what supposed “realists” views actually mean over the long-term. He is excellent at poking holes in status quo thinking. For example, on page 22, he nails it:

“Critics who say a soft energy path is unacceptable because it must change lifestyles are implying that they themselves favor no change in lifestyle even over fifty years. This implies a static, zero growth economy with no technical or social progress—presumably not what they have in mind,” he writes. “What they probably mean is that they desire no change in certain highly selective patterns and rates of change in lifestyle that they consider agreeable for themselves and appropriate for other people. That is a very different matter.”

See how he turns a seemingly plain-sounding, dull, bureaucratic response — “we can’t change people’s lifestyles” — into an explication of what that means. Of course governments and politics shapes people’s lifestyles! And if we can do that, let’s shape them for the environmental good and not for the bad.

*

In the conclusion to his introduction, Lovins shows his incredible optimism. His “soft path offers advantages for every constituency,” he argues.

a soft path simultaneously offers jobs for the unemployed, capital for businesspeople, environmental protection for conservationists, enhanced national security for the military, opportunities for small businesses to innovate and for big business to recycle itself, exciting technologies for the secular, a rebirth of spiritual values for the religious, traditional virtues for the old, radical reforms for the young, world order and equity for globalists, energy independence for isolationists, civil rights for liberals, states’ rights for conservatives.

Whew. Who could possibly oppose such a plan? There was something for everyone! At a time when the nation was scrambling for an identity, that must have been some kind of promise. Here was salvation and unity of purpose. Unfortunately, the plan also seems like one in which support is a mile wide and an inch deep. Sure, there’s something for everyone, but not much for anyone except those who wanted a radical overhaul of the energy system and the end of nuclear power. For them, it was a jackpot.

*

In chapter two of the book — page 25, if you’re following along at home — Lovins unleashes what his plan is.

“The second path combines a prompt and serious commitment to efficient use of energy, rapid development of renewable energy sources matched in scale and in energy to end use needs, and special transitional fossil fuel technologies… It does not try to wipe the slate clean, but rather to redirect our future efforts, taking advantage of the big energy systems we already have without multiplying them further.”

This sounds a lot like what green technologists are saying now, right? It’s realistic and smart. But wait, there is something that people don’t talk a lot about now: “matched in scale and in energy to end use needs.” We’ll get to talk more about this in the following pages, but Lovins’ was not sold on electrification. He calculated on page 39 that we only need “high-quality” electricity for 8 percent of end-use tasks. The continued rise of electronics has probably shifted that number upwards a bit. (Note to self/commenters: what is that number now?)

Lovins’ emphasis on de-electrification is not widely shared by most green technologists these days. I think we’ll see why in the following pages.

*

“Section 2.2: Hard Energy Paths” is one of Lovins’ most impressive. Here is where his ability to render the corporatespeak into plain reality becomes clear. He ticks off what would be necessary to satisfy the sky-high projections of demand just through 1985: 900 new oil wells, 170 new coal mines, 180 new coal plants, 140 new nuclear plants, 350 gas turbines… Then to get to the year 2000 the number get even larger: 450-800 nuclear reactors, 1000 to 1600 new coal mines, 15 million electric automobiles, etc.

It’s astounding and as he describes in 2.3, the energy industry alone would have required almost 75% of all the “net private domestic investment” from 1976 to 1985.

His basic point is that building all of that stuff just would have been too expensive and that spending all of their money on expensive reactors would bankrupt the utilities. In fact, this almost did come true with several floating the idea of a Federal bailout in 1984, largely because of cost overruns at nuclear power plants.

He ends the section on an ominous note: “thus some [utilities] must now tell their customers that the current dollar cost of a kilowatt-hour will treble by 1985, and that two-thirds of that increase will be capital charges for new plants.”

But what’s interesting is that while electricity prices did rise, they peaked in 1982 and 1983 and remain about at their late 70s levels. Lovins might point out this partially because nuclear plant building stopped in the mid-1980s. But capacity factors at nuclear plants also improved mightily — that means that the plants run much more often than they used to. The Nuclear Energy Institute gloats, “The average capacity factor for U.S. plants in operation in 1980 was 56.3 percent; in 1990, 66 percent; and in 2008, 91.5 percent.” The more often a plant can run generally speaking, the cheaper the unit cost of the power it produces.

I’m increasingly convinced, as any good biographer should be, that J.A. Etzler was a prophet, a futurist par excellence in a time when futurists were not employed by Nokia. He foresaw, to greater or lesser degrees, plastics, concrete, solar thermal power, synthetic fibers for clothing, apartments with elevators, and pumped storage to smooth out renewable energy intermittency… Not to mention gigantic floating islands powered by the tides and waves. The Seasteading Institute would be proud.  My notes will be deployed later this afternoon about his various visions — one might even all them lucid dreams — of the world.

But first, here’s some more links and citations about this forgotten tech visionary, as much for your benefit as for mine.

(I’ve uploaded PDFs of firewalled academic papers; if individual authors would like to see their papers taken down, please let me know. Otherwise, in the spirit of open access, they are presented complete.)

By or on Etzler:

• Etzler patent, “Navigating and Propelling Vessels by the Action of the Wind and Waves” April 1, 1842. This “naval automaton,” as he called it, is pictured above. This is probably his least interesting invention to me, but it sure looks interesting.
• The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and Utopian Origins of Economic Growth by Steven Stoll, a Fordham history professor and just released last year. This recent biography of Etzler is on its way from Amazon to my house, so I can’t offer any guidance about it just yet. My first thought, though, is that I’m not sure I like framing Etzler as a deluded inventor. If we held their engineering skills against most visionaries, they’d come up lacking. Still, this book looks fascinating — and I’m glad to have found a kindred spirit.
• Paradise (to be) Regained by Henry David Thoreau, a lengthy review of Etzler’s work, which had been suggested to him by Emerson. There’s much to be said about this particular work — and it will probably form the basis for a big chunk of my chapter on Etzler. In it, we already find the fundamental tension present in today’s environmental debate. Namely, can change come from one person after another deciding to care more deeply for the environment or will the restructuring of society require great technological progress? Of course, this being an age of synthesis, the answer is that it will take both societal rethinking, which slows the technological momentum of old systems, and creates space for technologies to find new applications and financing.
• “J. A. Etzler, An American Utopianist” in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, October 1956, by W.H.G. Armytage, the late British historian of technology
• “John Adolphus Etzler, Technological Utopianism, and British Socialism: The Tropical Emigration Society’s Venezuelan Mission and Its Social Context, 1833-1848” in The English Historical Review, April 1986, by Gregory Claeys, historian of political thought at Royal Holloway, University of London
• John A. Etzler and his plans for paradise by Gertrude Eagle, an out-of-print master’s thesis from the University of Miami, 1943
• “‘The American Myth’: Paradise (To Be) Regained” in PMLA, December 1959, by Frederic Ives Carpenter, a once-eminent English professor and critic at the University of Chicago
• “Spatial Thinking in the Bridge Era: John Augustus Roebling versus John Adolphus Etzler” by the late Brooke Hindle of the Smithsonian Institute, a history of science and technology heavyweight who succeeded Daniel Boorstin as head of the National Museum of History and Technology, now known as the National Museum of American History.
• Emigration to the Tropical World by Etzler. After failing to find funding and success in America, he decided to try his luck in even warmer climes.
• “John Adolphus Etzler: Scientific Utopianism during the 1830’s and 1840’s” by P.R. Brostowin, apparently his Ph.D. dissertation at New York University, 1969

Broader pieces that mention Etzler or provide historical, political, and technological context:

• “Technology and Democracy, 1800-1860” in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, March 1957 by Hugo A. Meier
• “Democratic Statecraft and Technological Advance: Abraham Lincoln’s Reflections on ‘Discoveries and Inventions’” in The Review of Politics, Summer 2001, by Eugene F. Miller
• “Master Mechanics and Evil Wizards: Science and the American Imagination from Frankenstein to Sputnik” in The Massachusetts Review, Winter 1992, by Glen Scott Allen, most noted for his work on Don DeLillo and other postmodernists. This work lists Etzler has a kind of spring for the stream of tech-heavy utopian literature that rushed out towards the end of the nineteenth century, including the megaclassic, Looking Backward:
• Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, a hugely influential utopian novel released in 1887
• History of American Socialisms by John Humphrey Noyes, first published in 1870
• American Wilderness: a new history by Michael L. Lewis, a professor at Salisbury University, Oxford University Press, 2007. Lewis locates Etzler’s technomessianism within the framework of Ordinance of 1785, which created a survey to slice up the American interior into 640 acre chunks. He writes, “So, at the same time that backwoods settlers burned, planted, and hunted to change forests into farms, the United States extended its legal boundaries over the same land, changing it into real estate.” He also notes that Etzler’s invented machine — the Satellite, a sort of all-purpose machine for plowing, threshing, and moving buildings — failed.
• Technological Utopianism in American Culture by Howard Segal, a University of Maine historian of technology currently writing a new book called “The Wave of the Future: High-Tech Utopias”
• “The Chartist Land Colonies of 1846-1848” in Agricultural History, April 1858, by W.H.G. Armytage positions Etzler’s work as one that was repurposed by agrarians in England
• “The Millennium, the West, and Race in the Antebellum American Mind” in the Western Historical Quarterly, October 1972, by Klaus Hansen, a professor of history at Queen’s
• “The Politics of Rediscovery in the History of Science: Tacit Knowledge of Concrete before its Discovery“ presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association by Chandra Mukerji… This is kind of a sideways link to Etzler. I got interested in it because he describes a sort of concrete construction technique that seemed to predate the modern era of concrete. It turns out that it was just after Etzler’s era that the use of Portland cement became widespread, or so the story goes. Mukerji describes the use of concrete as far back as 1670 and argues that concrete was never forgotten at all, it just went uncataloged in the preferred scientific language of the day. “The practice of making concrete seems from the archival record to have remained part of the tacit knowledge of artisans in the Roman world, and it did not need rediscovering at all,” she writes. “What constituted its 18th century “discovery” was its articulation as formal chemical knowledge, and reveals more about the accounting practices in scientific discovery than about concrete.
• Two Subtexts of Paul Auster’s Ghosts, Marku Salmela’s master’s thesis from the University of Tampere that looks at Etzler, among other things, 2001

From: NREL Energy Analysis Office

The Department of Energy released a new, by-way-of-introduction report on The Grid, which as you can read below, can “appropriately” be called “an ecosystem.”

Our century-old power grid is the largest interconnected machine on Earth, so massively complex and inextricably linked to human involvement and endeavor that it has alternately (and appropriately) been called an ecosystem. It consists of more than 9,200 electric generating units with more than 1,000,000 megawatts of generating capacity connected to more than 300,000 miles of transmission lines.

Via > Greenbiz

Image: flickr/sjalex

The April 30, 1911 edition of The New York Times featured a wonderful piece on the creation of J.G. Childs’ “wind turbine electrical plant,” which tells a delightful fairy tale about what wind power would do for the rural farm:

“Here are some of its possibilities on a farm,” we read:

It pumps all the water used upon the place and feeds an artificial stream and lake. The owner is relied of that chief dread that besets the country resident. He goes to bed with the comfortable assurance that should fire break out his hydrants will furnish ample streams of water driven by electrical force.

All the buildings are lighted by electricity, the plant running 100 or more 16-candle-power lamps if necessary. All parts of the house are connected by telephone, and communication with the stables, the boathouse, or the garage is readily secured through the same medium.

In the winter the residence and outbuildings are heated by electricity, and in the summer cooled by electric fans. One needs to have had experience of an electric cooking range to appreciate all the benefits. It is the simplest and least troublesome arrangement imaginable. All that is necessary is to move a switch and the current does the rest. The food is not only cooked more precisely but also more quickly than by any other process…

It is possible also to arrange so the carpets are cleaned by the vacuum process and the furniture dusted by suction. The housekeeper uses power from the same source to run her sewing machine and in the nursery it is employed to operate the youngsters’ mechanical toys…

The owner of the place uses an electric motor car because it is free from noise, dirt, and odor but more than everything else, he gets an unlimited quantity of electricity free and without trouble. His machine is always ready for immediate use and no appreciable time or trouble is expended in keeping it in that condition. When it comes in from a trip it is run into the garage, and recharged by the wind-plant, either directly from the generator or from the storage battery.

Life in the country will be made immeasurably more attractive by the wind turbine.

Where did this vision come from? It’s unsourced, as if the writer’s imagination saw a future utopia and reported on it. Unfortunately, nothing like this has really ever come to pass, although I dare say it seems a lot like the corporate plan for the Boulder Smart Grid City.  Only 97 years late.

Image: An electric car (left) next to a gasoline powered car (right) in Denver. Sometime between 1910 and 1920. Caption at the Library of Congress: An unidentified woman rides in an electric automobile, Julia Rhoads and Hazel Ladora Gates ride in a gas powered automobile, Denver, Colorado. The women wear fur stoles over their outfits and elaborate hats.

Now, friends, this is what I call an economic stimulus plan! John Adolphus Etzler, writing in 1836 , recommended a strict diet of solar, tidal, and wind power — and if we followed his recommendations, we’d end up with, well, you know, utopia:

I promise to show the means for creating a paradise within ten years, where every thing desirable for human life may be had for every man in superabundance, without labour, without pay; where the whole face of nature is changed into the most beautiful form of which it be capable; where man maj live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury, in the most delightful gardens; where he may accomplish, without his labour, in one year more than hitherto could be done in thousands of years; he may level mountains, sink valleys, create lakes, drain lakes and swamps, intersect every where the land with beautiful canals, with roads for transporting heavy loads of many thousand tons, and for travelling 1000 miles in twenty-four hours; he may cover the ocean with floating islands moveable in any desired direction with immense power and celerity, in perfect security and in all comforts and luxury, bearing gardens, palaces, with thousands of families, provided with rivulets of sweet water; he may explore the interior of the globe, travel from pole to pole in a. fortnight; he may provide himself with means unheard of yet, for increasing his knowledge of the world, and so his intelligence; he may lead a life of continual happiness, of enjoyments unknown yet; he may free himself.

Not even Barack has that much hope for green renewal. Although, it is rather impressive that it turns out that we can do all of the stuff that he suggested.

From: The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: An Address to All Intelligent Men by John Adolphus Etzler

Image: A big turbine and a little barn. flickr/tlindenbaum

Charles Greeley Abbott wasn’t any ordinary head of the Smithsonian Insitute. One of the world’s preeminent astrophysicists and a specialist in all things sun,  he invented one of the first solar cookers, seen above. And he happened to believe in paranormal phenomenon. All around, he must have been a pretty interesting guy, particularly after a few drinks.

Abbott wrote a book in 1938, while director of the Smithsonian, in which he ran down the state of sun science, The Sun and the Welfare of Man. The fascinating thing about this work is that it’s a scientific work about observing and measuring — spots, strength, variability, etc — that happens to include a chapter about “Harnessing the Sun.” It’s hard to imagine an astrophysicist just kind of dropping solar machines into the center of his book, but that’s what Abbott did. And along the way he provided a decently comprehensive history of early solar machines, courtesy of a many-page long quotation from A.S.E Ackerman, first published on US soil in the 1915 Smithsonian Report.

One rarely mentioned project is pictured below.

Here’s what Ackerman had to say about this very, very early solor motor:

A.G. Eneas, in the United States, used the popular truncated, cone-shaped reflector, collecting about 700 square feet of solar radiation. The weight of the reflector was 8,300 pounds.

The boiler was formed of two concentric steel tubes, the two together being incased in two glass tubes with a air space between them and another air space between the inner glass one and the outer steel tube. The water circulated up between the inner and outer steel tubes and down the inner tube. The boiler was placed at the axis of the cone. Its length was 13 feet 6 inche, its water capacity 834 pounds, and steam space 8 cubic feet. Hence the diameter of the outer tube appears to have been 1 foot 2 inches and the concentration of radiation 13.4; i.e. 13.4 square feet of sunshine were concentrated on each square foot of the external surface of the boiler…

The sun-power plant known as the Pasadena one was described and illustrated in the August, 1901, issue of Cassier’s Magazine by Prof. R.H. Thurston and on page 103 of the Railway and Engineering review of February 23, 1901. It is stated to have been designed by, and erected at hte expense of, ‘a party of Boston inventors whose names have not been made public.” …

‘According to newspaper accounts the all day average work performed by the engine is 1,400 gallons of water lifted 12 feet per minute, which is at a rate of 4 horsepower’ …

The Pasadena plant is said to have cost 1,000 pounds and Willsie, writing of it in 190, says it was the “largest and strongest of the mirror type of solar motor ever built.”

Image: Abbot, Charles Greeley. The sun and the welfare of man. (Smithsonian Scientific Series, Volume 2)
New York: Smithsonian institution series, inc., 1938. Scanned by the University of Wisconsin library.

The syllabus is a brilliant resource for history of energy and industrialization fans. Here are the books are articles I culled from the list:

• The Social Shaping of Technology, edited by Milton Keynes and Judy Wajcman
  This appears to be very influential, cited over 800 times. Here’s a quick (in academic circles) overview of the research and literature surrounding the social shaping of technology [pdf].
• Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology 1880-1940, David Nye
  “Using Muncie, Indiana, as a touchstone, David Nye explores how electricity seeped into and redefined American culture.”
• Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, Deborah Fitzgerald
  A bonus for this title — the first 40 or so pages in PDF courtesy of Yale University Press
• Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom by Brian Black
  “Against the background of the growing demand for petroleum throughout and immediately following the Civil War, Black describes Oil Creek Valley’s descent into environmental hell.”
• The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, Adam Rome
  “the first scholarly history of efforts to reduce the environmental costs of suburban development in the United States”
• Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s, Daniel Horowitz
  “Through carefully selected documents that bring together the high-level White House decision-making process and the national conversation about energy, Daniel Horowitz helps students understand both the crises of the 1970s and the continuing relationship between American economic and foreign policy.”

And a special note on a text included in Shulman’s class, Corporate Futures: The Diffusion of the Culturally Sensitive Corporate Form, edited by George Marcus.

Perhaps you’re not aware of it, but Shell, Chevron, and the rest of the Big Oil companies put out scenarios about the future of energy that you can only call science fiction. They even give the divergent future worlds they describe catchy, one-word names — Scramble, Blueprint — as if they were a restaurant you might trek across town to visit after glimpsing it through the window of a cab on a foggy night. Shell’s latest visions come with videos and flash animations. One video, transcript here [doc], seems to be talking about our real world:

In the Scramble world, events outpace actions. Security of energy supply and fears of losing economic ground shape decision-making. For the next 10 years, people from all walks of life join in the debate about energy and climate change. But no one seems truly wedded to action on a large scale. Governments generally choose solutions that are politically straightforward, and local. They prefer to rely on indigenous energy sources.  So coal makes a big come-back in some regions, despite its higher emissions… Drivers stay with liquid fuels. With oil becoming harder to find and produce, biofuel use grows rapidly. In the Scramble world, no one is prepared to change the status quo. Dealing with today’s problem takes priority. By the 2020s, life has become volatile and uncertain.  Energy availability is often tight.  Severe weather events are blamed on a lack of previous action on climate change.

But there’s hope. We do not have to take that nasty path, which might end up with consumers getting angry about the whole Big Oil thing. Instead, we can manage and plan our way out of the energy mess. All we need is, is… a Blueprint. It’s improbable story sounds like Barack:

The world of Blueprints shows what can happen when actions outpace events. Groups of seemingly disconnected people in California – venture capitalists, farmers, politicians – collaborate around opportunities for profitable action on climate change.Publics put international pressure on governments for change.  Smart investments in modern facilities improve air pollution, energy efficiency, and greenhouse gas emissions all at the same time. This isn’t a sudden outbreak of altruism.  It’s a recognition of shared interests, new opportunities for profitable business, and the benefits of taking action before it’s forced by circumstances. In the world of Blueprints, local actions spread and join up – like the C40 megacities pact of mayors and others, experimenting and sharing good practices around carbon emissions, transport and energy efficiency.

And of course the good world is what Shell wants. Because what’s good for the world is good for Shell, and vice versa. Of course.

In any case, these scenarios have a long and fascinating history, requiring, as they do, the application of the principles of fiction. Here’s a chapter from Corporate Futures that deals with the writing and editing of a set of Shell scenarios [pdf]. It’s structured as a Q&A between Betty Sue Flowers, a former English professor (and now director of LBJ’s library) who wrote the 1992 scenarios, and Robbie Davis-Floyd, a cultural anthropologist at UT-Austin, who share a “mutual fascination with myth.”

Flowers described Shell’s reasoning for making up the future ahead of time:

And they said, well, it’s actually not only false to have straight-line forecasting, but it’s dangerous because you can be lulled into thinking you do know the future, that you have the story for the future, and that the future is the past, put into the future. So what they decided to do instead was to build self-conscious stories, that is, they would call them “stories,” and to build two of them, equally persuasive, based on the same statistical beginning point and statistically told, that is, told in economic language, for thirty years into the future. They would spend three years putting this together with a team of twenty or so from all over the world, and then they’d spend the next year disseminating them in workshops around the world, so that what you got was a common culture based on not a story about the future but two stories about the future.

Seems a bit like a stall tactic, huh? Or at the least a bit of Sophistry, even if it was sophisticated and filled with charts and tables and good faith. What’s really interesting about this is that Shell finally got around to picking a scenario for the first time this year.

Blueprint it is, from now on.

But it being a social media heavy world now, and all 2.0 and stuff, Chevron one-upped Shell and came out with Energyville, a SimCity game designed to teach you how hard it is to power the world. I’m sure a post-doc somewhere is out there analyzing it as literature, and rightly so.

Sometimes, when I went to get deep on something, I just open up the log-in screen and listen to the piano-and-string heavy musical loop over and over. The problem is that I see an important event — someone dying/living, a mother holding a baby for the first time, a son coming of age — and then the loop ends and the vision fades, sometimes before I even recognize the faces of the people.

The game is all part of Chevron’s advertising campaign: Will You Join Us? This morning, I saw a San Francisco bus idling, fully-encased in the slogan.