Over at my home base, Wired.com, I wrote a short piece on the importance of the transmission of electricity. It was pegged to the anniversary of the completion of the first long-distance power line, which ran the 14 miles from Willamette Falls to Portland, Oregon.

That is not to say that power transmission was not already possible when the Portland line went in. Indeed it was a great problem of the day to get power in larger amounts and farther distances (think of it as power bandwidth). Belts and shafts could transmit power a short distance with reasonable losses. Compressed air — pushed through tubes — was employed on a city scale in places like Paris and Vienna, but there was no solution for transmitting power tens or even hundreds of miles.

Even among electrical-transmission advocates, there were some people who favored continuous current, others who liked alternating current. Numerous details remained to be sorted out when the Portland line went in, but it proved that it could be done, albeit with losses of about 25 percent.

Major advances came quickly in the next few years. A German team built a 100-mile alternating-current, high-voltage, three-phase transmission line from a hydroelectric generator to Frankfurt in the summer of 1891. It went many times farther than the Portland line, while maintaining the same efficiency of about 75 percent.

That convinced the hydroelectric developers of Niagara Falls to use alternating-current transmission to send their 200,000 horsepower all the way to Buffalo, New York, 22 miles away. When that plant went online in 1895, electrical transmission truly arrived. The company, in retrospect with deserved swagger, called the feat “the great step in the transition from mechanical power in industry to electrical power everywhere.”

• As you probably know, I sent a draft of my book to my publisher, Da Capo Books, in April. They accepted it for publication. It’ll be out in early 2011, if all goes well. Yes, that is a long time from now, but that seems to be how book publishing goes. When all is said and done, I’ll have been working with the idea for almost three years.
• I haven’t gotten back detailed edits yet, but I will soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in reading pieces of the draft, I’d be most grateful.
• About a week after finishing the book, I stumbled into another crazy project and co-founded 48 Hour Magazine with a group of friends. For whatever reason, what we thought would be a small project among friends blossomed into a global collaboration that received 1,500 submissions. What we produced in just two days of editing time (and two total weeks of having any kind of organization) is pretty awesome, I think. Then — and you might have seen coming — we got sent a cease-and-desist letter by CBS and written about in the New York Times and a bunch of other awesome places. It was tremendous fun, but exhausting; my skull hurt for days. Getting any extracurricular writing done has been really hard.
• That said, I have written a couple of appreciations for HiLoBrow, the culture site edited by my friends Joshua Glenn and Matthew Battles. My last two were Notorious B.I.G. and Paul Ehrlich.

Well, friends, I sent in a draft of my book to my editor last Friday, the 9th, and I’m taking a week off. In the meantime, you can make do with this wonderful cover.

This here is Thomas O. Perry’s windmill testing apparatus from 1882. A steam engine hooked up to all that stuff on the top drove the windmill being tested around in a circle at a constant speed. Dozens of windmills got hooked up to this thing and their power output recorded. From the results, Perry optimized the design of the American windmill from the kind you see here to the steel Aermotor-type you probably think of when you think of the Prairie windmill.

I had forgotten about this lovely collage created by Perry at the United States Geological Survey when the results of his tests were finally distributed in 1899. But it’s got to be one of the best five or ten images I’ve stumbled across. I expect to see it printed on t-shirts in the near future.

Image: flick/Rick Scheibner

I finished my first read of my first real draft. It felt great. I celebrated with Posole and a Belgian beer. These posts may be boring, but I want to document a little bit of the process. (If not for you, then for me.)

The easy part was: I started at the beginning of the draft and just read. As I saw small errors, I marked them in regular pen. Nothing fancy. But I wanted a way to denote places where larger work was necessary, so I devised this flag system that you see above. Here’s the concordance:

• Blue = add something.
• Green = fact check something.
• Yellow = rework in some formal or structural way.
• Red = Cut.

There’s a lot more blue than anything else, which makes sense to me. A project like this is so broad that you end up leaving things out even by accident! Other things, like the story of Birdsill Holly and the first district heating system in America, just haven’t found a place in the text, even though I’ve done lots of research on them. Other times, I’ve found new sources for sections I wrote months and months ago. Luckily, a surprising amount of that kind of stuff occurred to me while I was reading.

As I finished reading each chapter, I also took notes on it that were broad and overarching. Sometimes I wrote them on the first page of the chapter, but usually I just scribbled them in a little red notebook. These pages are messy, necessarily so. They are half brain map, half future hint. The ideas I’m usually expressing aren’t quite well formed enough to write out in detail. Instead, they are impressions that need to be worked into arguments and real ideas. Because I am knocking the book into rough shape before going in with the tiny hammer to do the detail work, I didn’t want to take the time to think through each one. Going halfway and writing down some bullshit without thinking it through would have made it worse, collapsing the impression into a half-truth. So, instead, I just scribble what makes sense probably only to me. These pages look like this:

On the left, I’m puzzling over what to do about sections describing basic features of renewable and fossil system. On the right, I’m thinking about what to do with these three chapters I have on different themes in teh 70s. The red pen doesn’t mean anything: I happened to lose my normal pen in the couch cushions for a minute.

Then, at the very broadest level, I sat back and pondered what was missing that I’d originally wanted to include when I just had themes and not stories. I realized that I’ve shortchanged photovoltaic development since the 1970s, 1990s environmental thought, electric transportation, and the development of the grid. So, I’ve highlighted those areas as spots where I need to translate the research I’ve done on them into words on the page. That will probably be the last step after I finish going through the flags.

One last thing: I’m tremendously enjoying fleshing out the citations. I had been doing in-text stuff or just noting where something came from in quickie footnotes. Now, I’ve stepped up my game. I’ve got whole hog citations on a couple of chapters now and the process of checking through and asking myself, “How do I know this?” on every single fact is amazing. Talk about a practice for learning intellectual discipline. Sometimes, I’ve realized that I think something is true by some combo of an interview and atmospheric distillation, e.g. the nitty-gritty details of PURPA’s implementation, and need to go back to my sources and find the groundtruth.

Something about doing this over and over is what’s really making me feel that the book is almost done. It’s not that the deadline is approaching. Rather, I have exhausted my brain silo, compressing, and transmitting the energy it stored. On one topic after another, I realize that there is nothing more for me to say.

Ok, back to it.

Well, I’ve gotten this far. This is the 380-page rough draft of the book. My current forecast is that it will balloon to about 420 pages before losing about 75 of those to get down to its playing weight.

I’m about halfway through the first edit and I’ve already reorganized the whole thing (again). The crucial thing is trying to elaborate what technological alternatives existed to our present system — not because we’ll implement as they were — but to show how society made choices or mistakes or experienced amnesia.

Several naturally connected chapters on the 1970s, environmentalisms, and “soft” technology will now be consolidated into a pivot chapter that’s kind of a hinge from the “what might have been” chapters to the “what might be (RE < C)" sections.

That feels good.

I also consolidated the firmly 19th-century chapters into an almost prefatory section on the development of the American energy system up to the widespread use of electricity and automobiles in the early 20th century. The argument there is roughly that wind and water played a larger-than-appreciated role in the country's industrial development; we've tended to follow the British narrative of coal --> industrialization, but in the U.S. we were well aware of the problems the Manchester system created and were eager to avoid those pitfalls. Combined with abundant water power, our early industry took a decidedly different, cleaner path.

In the year after the Civil War, fossil-powered mechanization took command, but wind power played a large role in another significant 19th century movement: building a cohesiveness country (and internal market) from all the spare regional parts. Water-pumping windmills, which may have numbered 6 million in total, were a key enabling technology for the creation of a citizenry that stretched from sea to sea.

Around the turn of the century, the universal power of electricity and diffusion of cheap automobiles (and tractors) transformed what had been a fairy local power market into a regional and national phenomenon. The many ways of making energy into usable forms and being mobile were largely subsumed into these two grand and intricate technologies.

Ever since then, cities and rural regions have been shaped and reshaped to fit the needs of power and car-enabled people. The greatest externality of the 20th century may be that we’ve built an infrastructure only suitable for a very narrow set of oil and coal-powered technologies.

But maybe not. One thing I hope my book brings to the energy debate is the idea that though the systems we have seem so entrenched as to be necessary, there have been technological alternatives that would allow radically less fossil energy usage. And we don’t really have to look far for models. We can look across the Atlantic to Europe, as most do now, or we can look into our own past when people confronted many of the same problems we do but at oblique angles. Their insights, if not their technologies, may help us see past the seemingly intractable debates that compose the energy dilemma in this country.

Ok. End summary. Back to editing.

Whoo boy. Environmentalists face an uphill battle in the wilds of the Internet.

Environmentalism is no longer regarded as a dominant plank for both political parties in improving American quality of life. Has environmental protection been too successful? Has it worked its way out of a job?

Back in the early days of the EPA, the agency hired about 100 photographers to go take pictures of the nation’s environment. Now, those 15,000 photographs are finally making their way out of the National Archives’ wonky databases and onto the very-slick Flickr Commons.

I’ll have a lot more of these photos going up over the months, but I wrote up the basic story for Wired Science, including the excellent work done by archivist (and all-around good guy) C. Jerry Simmons.

The original director of the EPA project, Gifford Hampshire, hoped to recreate the success the Depression-era Farm Security Administration had in calling attention to the plight of the nation’s rural poor. The new target was the environment. The visual evidence of the nation’s various pollution problems would help justify the existence of the EPA.

But as it happened, the photographers interpreted their task in different ways. What they captured was not simply a portrait of “nature,” but the environment as people knew it and lived in it.

“Documerica’s official mission effectively focused on popular but valid environmental concerns of the early 1970s: water, air and noise pollution; unchecked urbanization; poverty; environmental impact on public health; and youth culture of the day,” wrote archivist C. Jerry Simmons, in a 2009 article on the collection. “But in reaction to the varied pollution, health and social crises, Documerica succeeded also in affirming America’s commitment to solving these problems by capturing positive images of human life and Americans’ reactions, responses and resourcefulness.”

Traffic jams, noise pollution from jackhammers and 747s, and graffiti appear alongside photos of caribou and western landscapes. Coal mining and mudslides mingle with swimming, movie theaters and greased-pig chases.

It’s a remarkable portrait of the early 1970s, when manufacturing still ruled the economy and environmental laws had just begun to regulate the air and water. The photographs show people, technology and biosphere colliding, producing both devastating consequences and innovative solutions.

Of especial interest here are Jack Corn’s photos of coal mining, Marc St. Gil’s oil field photos, Lyntha Scott Eiler’s pictures of Navajo mining, and Charles Steinhacker’s images of nasty industrial facilities. It’s good to remember that companies didn’t just magically stop polluting. Environmental protection took human work and dedication as well as the development of new technologies.

Images: 1. Lyntha Scott Eiler. 2. Jack Corn. 3. Jack Corn.

Wind comes and wind goes. It’s feral power, part of a much larger natural system that humans are just figuring out how to domesticate.

Coal, on the other hand, is a burnable rock. Like most rocks, these “solidified sunbeams” just sit there until you do something with them. They are their own storage. Gregor Macdonald has written some very interesting (and disturbing) things about the flexibility of coal and how that is its key advantage in our weirdening future.

“Requiring no special containers, and can easily be broken up into small amounts and carried by animals and wagons. It stores well, and burns slowly,” MacDonald writes. “And is quite versatile for both large scale power generation, or low tech industrial use and home heating.”

Wind, it would seem, is quite the opposite. But it’s a more similar kind of resource than you might think because it can fairly easily be converted into other types of energy. In the 19th century and well into the 20th, water-pumping windmills turned air into water. Using wells that poked down just a few hundred feet, farmers could use the power of the wind to transfer close-to-free energy into the most precious commodity west of the 100th meridian: fresh water. Linking the airborne and underground systems helped surface dwellers to take full advantage of the materials available in both.

Now, in a modern twist on this idea, modern wind farms with their gleaming sculptural turbines are about to enter a new underworld. Compressed air energy storage, I reported at Wired Science, is on the verge of breaking into the mainstream.

Compressed-air energy storage plants use compressors to store electricity generated when it’s not needed. The air, pumped into large underground formations, is like a spring that’s been squeezed and when it’s needed, it can deliver a large percentage of the energy that it received.

The first and only such plant in the United States went online in 1991, and though the technology didn’t take off, it did prove that it worked. And now, combining cheap wind energy and compressed-air storage could create a potent new force in the electricity markets.

“This is the first nonhydro renewables technology that can replace coal in the dispatch order,” said David Marcus, co-founder of General Compression, a new company that received $16 million in funding from investors including the utility Duke Energy to build a full-scale prototype of their energy storage system, which would be deployed with arrays of wind turbines.

Compressed air turns wind into a gas that we can let expand and run a turbine in much the same way that burning natural gas executes the same maneuver in current plants. In other words, this technology turns the motion of the atmosphere into a fuel. Fuels can be stored; they are not evanescent energy flows. By taking advantage of the underground — abandoned limestone mines and cavities in salt domes — wind developers gain access to gigawatts of flexibility. At the flick of a switch, you can turn on the energy from the wind.

The best part is that we already know that it works. A plant in sleepy McIntosh, Alabama has been storing coal-fired energy inside a salt dome since 1991.