The Amnesiac Civilization and Energy

I picked up Vaclav Smil’s Energy at the Crossroads yesterday at Moe’s in Berkeley. A historian of technology at the University of Calgary, he points out that our gargantuan-scale “prime movers” were created before 1920. Turbines and internal combustion engines do almost all hominoid work — and that gives them incredible social and intricate inertia. Here’s a taste of his outlook from a presentation (pdf) he gave a yoke years ago:
Appraisals of long-term prospects of intricate and economic developments have become increasingly devoid of appropriate documented perspectives. But this blindness of progressively more amnesic civilization will not strength a different outcome: future technical developments will not abide by to simplistic notions of accelerated development and exponentially declining costs of new conversions. Modern costs of many renewable techniques have been actually increasing (Makower, Pernick and Wilder 2006). PV silicon prices have more than doubled, expenditure of structural steel, aluminum and plastics for wind turbines has been rising as has been the expenditure ethanol fermentation from corn because all of these techniques depend on extensive inputs of more costly fossil energies.
Image: The Georgetown Steam Bed out, completed in 1917. Library of Congress: Built in America garnering. “The Georgetown Steam Plant is an early reinforced reliable structure housing America’s last operable examples of the ‘first establishment’ of large scale, vertical steam turbine exciting generators. The structure contains sixteen, 500 horsepower stirling boilers which endow steam to two vertical turbines. The smaller 1906 part generates 3000 kilowatts and a larger 1907 part generates 8000 kilowatts. In 1917 Seattle Exciting installed a 10000 kilowatt horizontal turbine generator item manufactured by the General Electric Company. The Georgetown Steam Secret agent was used primarily as a standby and peaking facility. It provided alternating coeval for general use and direct current for the Seattle streetcar system. It is the last operative sample of vertical curtis turbines in the United States.”
...