WHAT IF SOLAR CAME BEFORE COAL

[Scribe of Timbuktu]

So I'm new here and I don't know if this question has been asked before but I'd really like to know what possible route the world would have taken if the industrial revolution began with the discovery of solar energy as opposed to coal. What would our world look like today?

[DrP]

If you think about it though, it could have never have happened that way.... we started burning stuff like wood and coal WAYYYYYY before our technology even touched upon the possibility of constructing a solar cell.

 

Can you imagine a cave dweller with a big club and animal skins grunting "Urrgg" discovering fire for the first time and then thinking, "Urrg... no! I must construct a silicon wafer and dope it accordingly and attach circuitry to produce electricity from the electrons excited in the wafer from the incident photons from the sun... Urrrrg!!!" I think it would be impossible - it is just the way technology evolves - building upon what we know already and the discovery of fire just comes way before electricity and solar power generation.

PS - just to clarify - Fire requires very little understanding to make and use as an energy source. Solar power on the other hand is way more complex and requires a complex understanding of science to achieve anything useful from.

[AbstractDreamer]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_power_station

The initially developed reciprocating steam engine has been used to produce mechanical power since the 18th Century, with notable improvements being made by James Watt

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power

The early development of solar technologies starting in the 1860s was driven by an expectation that coal would soon become scarce. However, development of solar technologies stagnated in the early 20th century in the face of the increasing availability, economy, and utility of coal and petroleum.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropowerhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropower

In India, water wheels and watermills were built^[when?]; in Imperial Rome, water powered mills produced flour from grain, and were also used for sawing timber and stone; in China, watermills were widely used since the Han dynasty. In China and the rest of the Far East, hydraulically operated "pot wheel" pumps raised water into crop or irrigation canals.^[when?]

Cragside in Northumberland was the first house powered by hydroelectricity in 1878^[1] and the first commercial hydroelectric power plant was built at Niagara Falls in 1879.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power

Wind power has been used as long as humans have put sails into the wind. For more than two millennia wind-powered machines have ground grain and pumped water.

The first windmill used for the production of electric power was built in Scotland in July 1887

 

So wind power or water power came first, then thermal (coal/wood), then solar. Cant imagine it any other way, order based on utility of coal/oil, and tech advancement.

 

No doubt fire came before all that

"Fire! Jane! Uggh! Photovoltaic cells to harness the power of the sun to convert renewable solar energy to electricity! Fire! Jane! Ughh!"

Edited December 15, 2016 by AbstractDreamer

[swansont]

 

So wind power or water power came first, then thermal (coal/wood), then solar. Cant imagine it any other way, order based on utility of coal/oil, and tech advancement.

 

 

!

Moderator Note

 

However, the OP is asking people to imagine it. So, everyone, instead of a recounting of history, if you are going to post, please address the OP.

 

...

 

Solar implies electrical, so the earliest applications would have to be for whatever electrical capabilities we had, if any. There are archeological discoveries of what are purported to be galvanic cells possibly used for electroplating, so if that's true you might envision solar being used for that. It probably would have spurred other electrical discovery and development. But it's not like there was any existing infrastructure that it would couple to.

 

Further, solar has only recently become efficient enough to be competitive with the energy density found in fossil fuels. Without the modern fabrication methods, I'm thinking that coal (and later, oil) probably would have won out anyway because of that and the relative ease of transportation. The shortcomings of modern solar (availability and energy storage) would have been more acute in the early stages.

[Endy0816]

There's solar thermal. Could have developed along those lines.

[Klaynos]

There's solar thermal. Could have developed along those lines.

I'm wondering whether you can generate a high enough steam pressure with boiling the water by focusing the sun to move a steam locative. With sensibly sized optics... That would be a fun experiment.

[AbstractDreamer]

Cant imagine it any other way, order based on utility of coal/oil, and tech advancement.

 

Addressed. The links were to put relevance to my comments.

 

The portability of chemical energy in coal, and the utility of oil and all its refined derivatives makes it surpass any alternative.

 

You would need advanced battery technology to make solar power portable.

 

Any country choosing solar over coal or oil would fall behind in the industrial revolution.

Edited December 15, 2016 by AbstractDreamer

[DrP]

They do have solar cooking devices which used a curved shiny metal surface to focus the rays onto the food. I think these can boil water too.

[AbstractDreamer]

how could anything other than coal and oil drive an industrial revolution?

[swansont]

There's solar thermal. Could have developed along those lines.

While that's true, that's already part of the history. We've had solar thermal since the start. The sun heats things up.

how could anything other than coal and oil drive an industrial revolution?

That is indeed the question at hand.

 

If solar were available, could that have driven electrical development? I'm guessing no; there just wouldn't be enough of an advantage.

 

I have raised this issue before: what if humans had developed before the dinosaurs ever came about, and before the carboniferous — i.e. before any significant development of life that would become fossil fuels. Take them out of the equation completely.

 

Perhaps that is necessary to explore the scenario in the OP. Assume coal, gas and oil are scarce commodities, and avoid the argument pointing to them altogether.

[StringJunky]

I'm wondering whether you can generate a high enough steam pressure with boiling the water by focusing the sun to move a steam locative. With sensibly sized optics... That would be a fun experiment.

These harness the thermal energy with mirrors focusing the heat from the light on the towers

 

The PS10 Solar Power Plant (Spanish: Planta Solar 10), is the world's first commercial concentrating solar power tower operating near Seville, in Andalusia, Spain. The 11 megawatt (MW) solar power tower produces electricity with 624 large movable mirrors called heliostats.[2] It took four years to build and so far cost €35 million (US$46 million).[3] PS10 produces about 23,400 megawatt-hours (MW·h) per year,

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS10_solar_power_plant#/media/File:PS10_solar_power_tower.jpg

There's a massive one in a America somewhere.

 

Edit: It's in Ivanpah:

 

Edited December 15, 2016 by StringJunky

[swansont]

Archimedes is supposed to have planned/used concentrated solar to set fire to Roman ships. Again, solar thermal is not some alternate timeline. We did have it before coal was widespread. Coal won.

[Endy0816]

I was thinking of the solar cookers, evaporative cooling, melting, water heating/boiling. Society would be different, but not impossible to imagine.

[Phi for All]

I'm wondering whether you can generate a high enough steam pressure with boiling the water by focusing the sun to move a steam locative. With sensibly sized optics... That would be a fun experiment.

 

Vitruvius had a basic steam engine design, based on even earlier compressed air designs. He was around from 80 BC - 15AD.

[Klaynos]

 

Vitruvius had a basic steam engine design, based on even earlier compressed air designs. He was around from 80 BC - 15AD.

That was still fire powered though wasn't it?

 

 

I think rather than considering solar before coal/oil perhaps we should consider a planet without coal or oil deposits...

[Sriman Dutta]

So I'm new here and I don't know if this question has been asked before but I'd really like to know what possible route the world would have taken if the industrial revolution began with the discovery of solar energy as opposed to coal. What would our world look like today?

So I'm new here and I don't know if this question has been asked before but I'd really like to know what possible route the world would have taken if the industrial revolution began with the discovery of solar energy as opposed to coal. What would our world look like today?

So I'm new here and I don't know if this question has been asked before but I'd really like to know what possible route the world would have taken if the industrial revolution began with the discovery of solar energy as opposed to coal. What would our world look like today?

To harness solar energy, we have to be technically very advanced. During the Industrial Revolution of 18th century our community was not so advanced.

[arc]

Just a reminder, not meaning to distract from the OP, but, whether you use wind, water, coal, gas or any other examples you are actually using solar energy. It's just each one has a specific time delay specific to its derivative process to and from the solar source. Fossil fuel being probably the oldest (photo synthesis) (or would it be nuclear from some primordial star?), and photo voltaic being the most instantaneous source with the others assuming their respective positions along their own mechanistic timeline.

[Phi for All]

That was still fire powered though wasn't it?

 

Right, I'm just saying the design was within our abilities should we have decided that polluting with burnt fuels was taboo.

[Danijel Gorupec]

If Earth never had oil/coal deposits...

 

I would be a farmer. My father too. He would tell stories to me - about days when wood covered all land and when sperm whales lived in seas.

 

I would visit a library in nearby town very often. I would read about electricity... dreaming about the future electrical world. But knowing that today only the elite can afford to play with electric toys.

 

On my way home I would be thinking how we cut trees faster than they can regrow. I would be tempted to join some environmentalist group... but no. I am painfully aware that fallen trees make steel plows. Yes, steel! Without a steel plow we would start dying of hunger - there is almost 3 billion people on this planet. How will we ever reach the electrical world if we cut all the trees much sooner?

 

I look at the Moon above. The Moon too is unreachable.

[swansont]

If Earth never had oil/coal deposits...

 

I would be a farmer. My father too. He would tell stories to me - about days when wood covered all land and when sperm whales lived in seas.

 

I would visit a library in nearby town very often. I would read about electricity... dreaming about the future electrical world. But knowing that today only the elite can afford to play with electric toys.

 

On my way home I would be thinking how we cut trees faster than they can regrow. I would be tempted to join some environmentalist group... but no. I am painfully aware that fallen trees make steel plows. Yes, steel! Without a steel plow we would start dying of hunger - there is almost 3 billion people on this planet. How will we ever reach the electrical world if we cut all the trees much sooner?

 

I look at the Moon above. The Moon too is unreachable.

We would never make it to 3 billion in this scenario.

[arc]

We would never make it to 3 billion in this scenario.

 

I wonder how close we could have gotten with wood burning steam driven tractors?

(supplemented by large solar thermal mirrors of course)

Edited December 15, 2016 by arc

[Endy0816]

Fresnel lenses can actually melt steel:

 

 

Interesting to speculate on at any rate. Imagining what would have happened had our ancestors went along the tech tree a different route.

Edited December 15, 2016 by Endy0816

[Phi for All]

Interesting to speculate on at any rate. Imagining what would have happened had our ancestors went along the tech tree a different route.

 

And that's the way to think about it. Not using steam tractors that simply substitute green components in industrial age tech, but rather a whole different branch on the tree of tool evolution.

 

Am I wrong in thinking that limiting ourselves to solar power would encourage more of a united effort in our species? Burning fossil fuels makes working in small groups efficient, but wouldn't solar-only push us towards more concerted efforts in creating and using energy from the sun to work for us?

[Ken Fabian]

If fossil fuels had been scarce resources would we have had an industrial revolution? Not as it played out historically but I suspect we would still have achieved a lot. We may have valued their products - and the alternatives like steel making from charcoal - more, without the option of taking them for granted and whilst perhaps the consumer economy with it's growth in prosperity as well as extravagant wastefulness may have been harder to achieve economic growth and innovation would not have stopped.

 

Would we truly be less capable of lifting ourselves out of poverty or would there have been earlier and greater incentives to manage our economic activities within the bounds imposed? Greater use of wind, hydro and solar seems obvious but forest farming - for timber, firewood, blacksmith's charcoal, chemical feedstocks - less obvious from our perspective, could have looked crucial and become more important. All these technologies would have been economically important and subject to ongoing innovation at a greater rate because of it. Still, the impacts would likely play out in more than just the technologies we rely on - pace and type of social change, governance, warfare, academic and ideological thinking...

[Endy0816]

And that's the way to think about it. Not using steam tractors that simply substitute green components in industrial age tech, but rather a whole different branch on the tree of tool evolution.

 

Am I wrong in thinking that limiting ourselves to solar power would encourage more of a united effort in our species? Burning fossil fuels makes working in small groups efficient, but wouldn't solar-only push us towards more concerted efforts in creating and using energy from the sun to work for us?

 

Our own research is so relatively recent it is hard to say. Anytime we needed a sudden or large demand there would probably be issues. Then again there's also alternatives which are less intensive.

 

 

"Dave, you need to stop taking more than two minutes in the shower."

"But Dad, I need to look good to impress Susie. She's super cute and she's already apprenticed to maintain the evacuated chamber at the plant."

"Alright, 5 minutes, but no more. You know how it is in the morning. The heat stored underground can only supply so much. The TEG couldn't maintain power for the computer yesterday. No computer, no Skype."

"Sheez. Okay, Dad."