Alternate energy sources in the Second Industrial Revolution?

[Oba]

I was wondering what it would take for fossil fuel usage to become marginalized (at least as marginalized as hydro is today, better more so) in all significant energy sectors (like automobiles, power stations, factories, aircraft and so on) during the Second Industrial Revolution and/or Machine Age?

To me, it seems there are a few ways this could have happened, without radically changing history before the latter half of the nineteenth century.

A relatively developed and powerful country with insignificant domestic fossil fuel resources would simply decide to try a path of energy independence.

Potential countries I have thought of:

• Japan is the most obvious case: Almost no fossil fuel reserves and a rapidly growing economy, not to mention the fact that the Invasion of Manchuria was in no small part due to the need for fossil fuels, and so began WWII. Obviously, Japan would have benefited greatly, even more so than other countries, from energy independence, and this could only be achieved through alternative energy pathways.
• Brazil has large but isolated oil fields and minute natural gas reserves, many of which would not be accessible with the technology at the time, and given that it pioneered industrial-scale usage of alcohol fuel even before WWII, it does not seem unreasonable that Brazil could choose to scale up this path much earlier - and more completely - than in OTL, given a more stable government.
• Argentina might actually be a better prospect than Brazil, given that it was more developed in some ways at the time and had less fossil fuel reserves (Australia and Ghana have more proven oil reserves even today). The temperate climate would make the sugarcane ethanol solution used in Brazil infeasible with the technology at the time, but wind, hydro, wood gas (from any sort of biomass, actually) and - unlike tropical Brazil - wave and tidal power would be feasible in temperate Argentina.
• Thailand? I don't have much of an idea on the fossil fuel reserves in Thailand - but I think they are moderate sized, but a more developed Thailand then than in OTL would be quite easy, given the wet tropical location - making Brazil's ethanol model quite easily applied, given sufficient Thai willpower. Thailand also has plenty of hydropower - more easily accessed than Brazil's, I believe - and of course the potential for solar [thermal] energy generation.

 

[Le Gwen]

Well, it is borderline ASB. Hydro and geothermy are limited by geography. Ethanol is an energy sink, unless made with sugar cane and even then the return on investment is barely positive.

Basically, you can get to early industrialization through efficiency gains in hydro and wind power but you'll be stuck there

 

[Rstone4]

Well, baring some kind of stumble-upon technology for electrical transmission, vehicles are going to run on some kind of petroleum.

This doesn't address the coal and oil powered power plants. Coal power plants are cheaper and faster to build than hydro power.

In order to not have coal and oil power you are going to need another power source that is easier to use.

 

[Oba]

Well, thanks to AC power transmission, which was invented early in the Second Industrial Revolution, distribution would be much easier than ever before, enabling the usage of electric automobiles, also common early in the first industrial revolution: Relatively energy-dense nickel-zinc batteries were invented in 1901, as were the longer lasting and cheaper nickel-iron batteries, both of which are still used today. Wood gas production had been known since the 1830s, and could have become more widely used (potentially along with liquefaction even), especially in countries like Brazil where biomass was more easily accessible than natural gas.

Ethanol is indeed a net energy loss even with current technology in the Temperate zone, but it is actually quite efficient in wet tropical zones using sugarcane (or palmyra palms). Furthermore, biodiesel (or just straight vegetable oil) could be used in the wet tropics, perhaps even more easily, given the productivity of oil palms; elsewhere, other oil crops - like rapeseed, avocados, hemp, yellow nutsedge and such - could be used instead for the same purpose.

Flexible fuel vehicles were already known in the Second Industrial Revolution: Henry Ford's Model T was the first. Even more so, steam cars (like the contemporary Doble steam car, for example) - using external combustion engines - can run on any heat source, so they might be a better choice still. Coupled with batteries in a plug-in hybrid, a compact steam engine could IMHO easily provide an alternative to the petrol car.

 

[Shadow Master]

For the power stations, not likely but possibly concentrated solar? Flash boils water, turns steam turbine (like a modern Nuc plant, but without wastes/shielding costs/concerns) and generates electricity, but then you need to store it for night time use. Not sure if rotational storage is possible back then or not.

Vehicles, you really need ethanol or another growable fuel base, because elecrtic isn't going to be such a great thing back then (or even today).

If we are talking about a national priority program, ie funding is not limited, why not go with Underground Greenhouses for yearlong sugarcane production?

 

[TheMann]

The problems with using electricity in cars is that modern batteries do not charge fast enough to make them able to compete with internal combustion engines. The use of changing batteries rather than recharging could get around this problem, but you would need many times more batteries then vehicles, which is an obvious economic problem as well as potentially an environmental one. If one could make a system of charging that feeds enough energy to the batteries to make recharging fast without frying the batteries, it makes such cars possible. Tesla's modern 'Supercharger' system is close but not quite there, and there is a problem of providing to the charger sufficient current at a high enough voltage to make the idea work.

The problems with ethanol as it is made today are obvious, and on that one I think the focus needs to be on the production of ethanol from cellulosic methods, using the modified e.coli bacteria idea worked on by the guys at the DoE. That would, if successful, will lick much of that problem. Algae-based biodiesel can also go far for much of the world's demand for energy, as it can be done in a way to make it both good for energy and land use.

 

[Curiousone]

The problems with using electricity in cars is that modern batteries do not charge fast enough to make them able to compete with internal combustion engines.

Yes but cars made in the second industrial revolution wouldn't have the extra weight modern cars are deemed to need. As they were then, they'd be practical (simply not as practical as petrol turned out to be.

Per OP's question though - uh it's difficult with Geological PoD's being frowned upon. If they weren't I can imagine Steam Engines proving their utility & then the world running out of coal quickly, moving onto Hydro-Electric at first then more slowly then OTL onto Concentrated Solar.

Yet with no geological PoD? ..

There might be a pre-1900 PoD.

You'd need a way to get an alternative form of energy to be cheaper. Steam Engines took center stage in England first because of her higher cost of labour, availability of coal.

You'd need somewhere tropical (more solar intensity), without coal, with a high cost of labour & the technology to be industrializing.

Another poster had mentioned I think it was Burma as being at a high stage of pre-industrialization when the colonial powers arrived. If China could manage to not go into seclusion around the 15th century, & some of it's inventors tinker with Solar Concentrators for a craft purpose & figure out how to store energy with warm salt.. then maybe just maybe the industrial revolution kicks off in South East Asia in that fashion & subsequent innovation proceeds down that path. Difficult.

 

[fortyseven]

The problems with using electricity in cars is that modern batteries do not charge fast enough to make them able to compete with internal combustion engines. The use of changing batteries rather than recharging could get around this problem, but you would need many times more batteries then vehicles, which is an obvious economic problem as well as potentially an environmental one. If one could make a system of charging that feeds enough energy to the batteries to make recharging fast without frying the batteries, it makes such cars possible.

A steam/electric or stirling/electric car would work.

 

[Mark E.]

Well, it is borderline ASB. Hydro and geothermy are limited by geography. Ethanol is an energy sink, unless made with sugar cane and even then the return on investment is barely positive.

Basically, you can get to early industrialization through efficiency gains in hydro and wind power but you'll be stuck there

There is another alternative for ethanol. Half the energy it takes to distill it goes into breaking the azeotrope, to refine it from 96% to 100% so it could be blended with petroleum based fuels. Re-design the engines to burn ethanol with 5% water, and the overall supply/use process becomes more energy efficient.

 

[Oba]

A steam/electric or stirling/electric car would work.

Very true. Plug-in hybrids with external combustion engines, like the steam engine or the Stirling engine (or an Ericsson engine or closed-Bryton cycle gas turbine), would not only solve the "range problem" (which actually is not really much of a problem; see here and below) but also could use any heat source, unlike any internal combustion engine. And electricity could be used for power leveling and for whenever thermal energy is less convenient than electrical energy.

Purely electric cars could also work too, though, as they did for a while in the early 20th century. And modern batteries, like the potassium-ion battery, which has the highest known cycleability of any battery and is cheaper than and functionally comparable to lithium-ion batteries, and electrically rechargeable metal-air batteries. Even in the Second Industrial Revolution, there were already nickel-iron and nickel-zinc batteries, both superior to the batteries used in the famous General Motors EV-1, (see here too for another source on this point.)

 

[b0ned0me]

Wood gas production had been known since the 1830s, and could have become more widely used
...
Ethanol is indeed a net energy loss even with current technology in the Temperate zone, but it is actually quite efficient in wet tropical zones using sugarcane (or palmyra palms). Furthermore, biodiesel (or just straight vegetable oil) could be used

The trouble with every one of these is that you are spending a ton of time and effort cultivating and harvesting slow-growing vegetation, and then extracting part of it, and burning that part. How does this gain you anything over spending time and effort digging up billions of years worth of fossilized vegetation processed by nature and burning all of it, while leaving the land for cultivation of other crops?

Thats not even getting into the whole energy density and efficiency issues, which is what kept coal-fuelled trains running through the firewood-filled forests and eventually killed the steam engine completely.
Without some really extreme religious or geological POD this just isn't going to happen because it flies in the face of every relevant economic and engineering incentive. Any economy constructed along these lines is going to just get crushed by the first economy to twig how really useful fossil fuels are - which is why the current effort to wean ourselves off them is so painful.

 

[Oba]

Without some really extreme religious or geological POD this just isn't going to happen because it flies in the face of every relevant economic and engineering incentive. Any economy constructed along these lines is going to just get crushed by the first economy to twig how really useful fossil fuels are - which is why the current effort to wean ourselves off them is so painful.

I disagree with that: fossil fuels only dominated the First Industrial Revolution so much because it happened in cold, barren Britain instead of warm, fertile India or, to a lesser extent, China (yes I know that China has used coke since the Song Dynasty but most of the coal is in the farther north). Not using fossil fuels at all probably is indeed unrealistic, but not being dependent on them any more than we in OTL are on hydropower seems perfectly reasonable, especially given the fact that many very highly populated areas (like Ethiopia and Japan) largely lack fossil fuel reserves.

Really? Again, I disagree: The reason why we are not getting off fossil fuels now is because of capitalist greed and disinformation, not because fossil fuels are superior (especially since we now have batteries more energy dense than diesel and nuclear power, which is far more energy dense than coal).

 

[Grand Admiral Thrawn]

How are batteries denser than nuclear power? This link, a physicist points out that uranium is pretty dense. As to the rest, the fact that the US, among others, still uses coal for most electricity generation, and not hydro, or other types, is not capitalist disinformation (probably greed, that is the "invisible hand") but the fact that batteries store energy, they do not produce it.

So the production of energy has costs no matter which type one uses: coal, from digging it out to air pollution to storing the waste; nuclear waste; hydro, which damages the local ecosystem. Natural gas seems clean enough, except getting it out of the ground. Wind and solar seem the cleanest overall, AIUI, just that it will take (???) a couple of hundred of billions of dollars to set it up, and on a kilowatt per hour cost (for now I believe, will decrease when we build on a large scale), is more expensive than coal, or the other types, and still requires a base energy source due to the unpredictable output of Nature.

Probably the main problem with a different energy source is that the first part of the Industrial Revolution needed coal (coke) for steel, so shipping in more coal for electricity is not much harder at the margin, once the infrastructure is already built up due to making steel. Most nations had coal, and those that tried hydo, found hydro to be expensive. So while rapeseed may make fuel, it is easier and cheaper just to pump oil from the ground. However, ignoring Europe for the moment, if Russia in the early 1900's could try autarky for a moment, with massive peasant population and growing industrialization, let's ignore any oil they had, so that they use rapeseed to fuel everything.

No idea how much land Russia would need in 1900 to fuel most everything from bio-diesel, but that is the only country I could think of that is land/peasant intensive yet not too industrialized, (so political pressure to keep employed) and capital poor, relatively (compared to Germany, UK, or the US).

Also, anyone know how to indent or otherwise make posts prettier? I tried pasting from word, and using the indent option when creating it, but no dice either way.

 

[Carl Schwamberger]

This is akin to the thread i started a while back that assumed coal/petroleum became unavailable for the industrial revolution. Question was how far does this slow the industrial revolution. Short answer I think is there would be no 19th century surge. There might a a far slower industrial 'evolution' requiring centuries to move technology from carbon based energy to something else. Or there might be a stagnation of a millineum of more.

 

[lounge60]

And the Nicholas Tesla' "power receiver" of electricity from..... the ether?
Ok,ok,is ASB.

 

[Legofan4]

Efficiency

The biggest problem with using electricity to run anything is that it is very inefficient to produce the best any heat engine can ever be in a universe where the current laws of thermodynamics hold is around 40% any higher and your talking asb. While using biofuels seems like a good idea it would take massive amounts of land to produce enough fuel to maintain an industrial society like ours. Also any land used for fuel would take away from land used for food which would be a problem eventually where there would not be enough of one or the other. The reason today we haven't switched from fossil fuels is almost entirely economic because they are cheap comapared to the costs needed to setup an entirely new infrastructure to support a change in fuels.

 

[Oba]

How are batteries denser than nuclear power? This link, a physicist points out that uranium is pretty dense. As to the rest, the fact that the US, among others, still uses coal for most electricity generation, and not hydro, or other types, is not capitalist disinformation (probably greed, that is the "invisible hand") but the fact that batteries store energy, they do not produce it.

So the production of energy has costs no matter which type one uses: coal, from digging it out to air pollution to storing the waste; nuclear waste; hydro, which damages the local ecosystem. Natural gas seems clean enough, except getting it out of the ground. Wind and solar seem the cleanest overall, AIUI, just that it will take (???) a couple of hundred of billions of dollars to set it up, and on a kilowatt per hour cost (for now I believe, will decrease when we build on a large scale), is more expensive than coal, or the other types, and still requires a base energy source due to the unpredictable output of Nature.

Probably the main problem with a different energy source is that the first part of the Industrial Revolution needed coal (coke) for steel, so shipping in more coal for electricity is not much harder at the margin, once the infrastructure is already built up due to making steel. Most nations had coal, and those that tried hydo, found hydro to be expensive. So while rapeseed may make fuel, it is easier and cheaper just to pump oil from the ground. However, ignoring Europe for the moment, if Russia in the early 1900's could try autarky for a moment, with massive peasant population and growing industrialization, let's ignore any oil they had, so that they use rapeseed to fuel everything.

No idea how much land Russia would need in 1900 to fuel most everything from bio-diesel, but that is the only country I could think of that is land/peasant intensive yet not too industrialized, (so political pressure to keep employed) and capital poor, relatively (compared to Germany, UK, or the US).

Also, anyone know how to indent or otherwise make posts prettier? I tried pasting from word, and using the indent option when creating it, but no dice either way.

I did not say that batteries were more energy dense than nuclear power: I stated that there are existing batteries that are more energy dense than diesel fuel (which is actually and indeed incorrect); nevertheless ,the battery in question (the aluminum-air battery) has a higher energy density than black coal with the Al-air battery having over eighty megajoules of energy per litre while black coal only has about twenty megajoules of energy per litre.

Coal is not needed for steel production: Charcoal was used long before the Ancient Chinese started using it for metallurgical purposes in the early eleventh century. Even today, Brazil's steel industry is heavily dependent on the Cerrado for charcoal.

 

[Oba]

While using biofuels seems like a good idea it would take massive amounts of land to produce enough fuel to maintain an industrial society like ours.

(Emphasis mine) Very true, but remember that there are not only other energy sources besides biomass but also that per capita energy usage - and the global population itself - was far lower in 1914 than it is today in 2014.

I would also like to point out that, even with turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century technology, there would be plenty of ways of grid energy storage for non-combustion-based energy sources: Pumped hydro, hot water thermal energy storage tanks and compressed air could be easily accomplished with the technology of the day, enabling liberation from the cycles of the wind, sun, tides and the waves, which in turn would allow vastly more effective usage of these energy sources.

 

[Legofan4]

We have these systems today but they are only used for peak demand usage but they are energy loss systems where it will take more energy to store it then can be stored through these methods. All energy storage methods introduce another kayer of efficiency losses on top of the normal losses from generating energy in the first place. These systems also use there energy very fast. A pumped hydro storage with a reservior the size of a mountain can use up its water in about 4 hours but takes almost all night to refill the reservior. And anything that involves burning anything will result in anlmost 60% of the energy going into irreversibilities in an engine, turbine, whatever. Also why would society not reach a point with extensive energy use by a majority of it people?

 

[lounge60]

using biofuels seems like a good idea it would take massive amounts of land to produce enough fuel to maintain an industrial society like ours. Also any land used for fuel would take away from land used for food which would be a problem eventually where there would not be enough of one or the other.

What about biofuel from the sea...algaes (or algaes genetically modified).