Rediscovering the Forgotten History of Clean Energy Innovation

categories: Clean Energy, DIY, Imagining the Future, Solutions

Published August 05, 2009 @ 08:12PM PT

Gas station turned into religious meeting hall, April 1974

A home entirely off the grid, heated with solar power. Another made to resemble a park, with a green roof and daylighting. An apartment building in NYC with solar collectors and a wind-powered generator on the roof, which generate enough energy to power all the building's public areas.

We're talking about 2009, right? Nope: 1973.

$Cover of book \"Sorry, Out of Gas\"$ Over at We Make Money Not Art, Regine De Batty reviews Sorry, Out of Gas: Architecture's Response to the 1973 Oil Crisis, a catalog produced to document an eponymous exhibition last year at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal. The show's curators make the case that the oil embargo by Arab oil-producing nations in 1973, which caused an enormous price shock that sent gas and other energy prices soaring worldwide, spurred a parallel burst of creativity among designers, architects, engineers, and others interested in solutions to oil dependency.

Sorry, Out of Gas includes "a chapter dedicated to oil, from the embargo to the games that were created at the time to educate or even sometimes dedramatize the issue," says Regine.

I was particularly fascinated by a series of discourses pronounced in the 70s by world leaders. They were much bolder and more undisguised than the ones voiced by today's politicians. It feels like our leaders prefer to tread much more carefully and are afraid of causing us any discomfort.

The rest of the book is divided in chapters that correspond to alternative sources of energy and their use in architecture: Sun, Earth, Wind and Integrated Systems.

"Today, it seems that much of their work (at the notable exception of Buckminster Fuller) and ideas have sunk into oblivion," writes Regine.

(A symptom, perhaps, of the "shock to trance" syndrome that then President-elect Obama talked about in a mid-November interview last year: "You know, oil prices go up, gas prices at the pump go up, everybody goes into a flurry of activity. And then the prices go back down and suddenly we act like it's not important, and we start, you know, filling up our S.U.V.'s again. And, as a consequence, we never make any progress. It's part of the addiction, all right. That has to be broken. Now is the time to break it.")

As the oil embargo ended and energy prices began to fall, apparently these architectural experiments ended. It's frustrating to contemplate that we've let decades slip by with little progress on reducing our heavy reliance on oil. But it's also fascinating to consider that the "green architecture" innovators of today have an unexpected legacy to draw upon as they make up for lost time.

This book sounds so interesting that I didn't want to wait until I could get a copy myself before mentioning it here. Digging around for some other reviews verifies that it's worth nabbing a copy:

"Though the book/exhibit brings together some interesting and relevant architectural examples, graphics and publications, like the journals of the pioneering Underground Space Center at the University of Minnesota, it is most effective at conveying the sense of the enthusiasm and creativity of those times, which dissipated as the years went on...until we find ourselves there again now, in a sense, picking up where we left off." (Center for Land Use Interpretation)

"Using everything from architectural drawings, photography, archival television footage, and historical artifacts such as board games and ephemera from popular culture of the day, the catalogue is divided into four central themes--Sun, Earth, Wind, and Integrated Systems. Sorry, Out of Gas examines everything from passive and active solar heating, underground architecture, recycled materials and experiments in wind technology to reduce our dependence on non-renewable energy. Illustrated by British author and illustrator Harriet Russell, a magnificently and specially commissioned children's story entitled "An Endangered Species" opens the book's various discussions, exploring non-renewable energy and the ways in which children can conserve our planet's valuable resources." (Canadian Architect)

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Image: "Gas stations abandoned during the fuel crisis in the winter of 1973-74 were sometimes used for other purposes. This station at Potlatch, Washington, west of Olympia was turned into a religious meeting hall. April 1974." By David Falconer. Source: U.S. EPA, via Wikimedia Commons

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Comments (11)

Sorry, Out of Gas is, indeed, a fantastic book. Jon Naar's photographs of crazy 60s-era solar homes out in the desert alone are worth the cover price. Very highly recommended, and I'm glad to hear that word is getting out there.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, I'm working on a book about the history of what we now call green technology. It covers a much broader range of time periods and technologies, and is more analytic, less descriptive. I've got a research and project site up at greentechhistory.com. I've been assembling a renewable energy reading list with a lot of other books and papers on related topics.

Posted by Alexis Madrigal on 08/06/2009 @ 03:38PM PT
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I'll look forward to reading your book, Alexis (as well as Out of Gas). Is there any particularly surprising discovery that you've made so far about the history of green tech, that you can share?

Posted by Emily Gertz on 08/07/2009 @ 08:19AM PT
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I think this book sounds like a great resource. I recently watched a DVD discussing current attempts at "Green" construction, including a few self-sustaining buildings as it were in China. Its a great DVD and I really recommend it to people who think this book sounds interesting. I have not read the book though I fully intend to. The DVD is "E2: The Economics of Environmental Design".

Alexis, I would love to know when your book comes out. I have a small environmental yahoo group that I am always trying to breathe new life into and your work sounds utterly fascinating and would greatly intrigue my members.

Posted by Alexa Weger on 08/08/2009 @ 08:48AM PT
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@Emily: There are a few key ideas that I've stumbled across.

The first is that renewable energy played an underappreciated role in industrial revolution in the U.S. Unlike Britain, which really got going with coal, American factories used more hydropower than coal all the way through 1850. Windpower also opened up the prairies for farms, unleashing a torrent of energy (i.e. food) upon the nation. So, even though the overall horsepower or kilowatt hours (or whatever metric) of a lot of early renewable energy technologies was rather low, their social impact was very high.

Second, every energy technology has receieved enormous support from the government, as have biotech and most of the packet of technologies associated with computing and the Internet. Most of the subisidies and R&D money have gone to nuclear power and fossils. And by most, I mean almost all of it. Despite what free marketeers might want to think, the markets for energy have never been "unfettered" or structured in a neutral way. For many years, the government wanted to encourage energy consumption, not conservation. (In retrospect, perhaps that wasn't the best policy, but that's an easy thing to say when you live in a fabulously rich country with unfettered access to all forms of energy.) The Cold War directly and indirectly drove U.S. energy policy for nearly thirty years. Thus, nuclear power plants got tons of support — despite the existence of many of the solar building and water heating techniques (as promoted by the 50s era Association for Applied Solar Energy) that are now in use elsewhere in the world.

For a lot of green tech types, I think it's exhilarating and surprising to find intellectual predecessors. There have been people making roughly the same arguments for solar power for a hundred years. In the 50s, Farrington Daniels at the University of Wisconsin, for example, would be more than at home in most of the debates that we're familiar with. Some of the earliest advocates of solar power — say, John Ericsson, a famous-in-his-day inventor — pushed hard to deploy it in the poor/developing countries of the global south.

But the key question that people ask me a lot is something like this: do the technologies already exist to generate a huge percentage of our light, heat, and power from renewable sources?

My answer is a qualified yes, for three main reasons: 1) green tech has never received funding at levels comparable to the other "new" industries of the 20th cenury (biotech, nuclear power, semiconductors, network tech). We don't know how much cheaper and better solar, wind, geothermal, and energy storage can get, but they are already pretty close to competing with fossil fuels in many places. 2) The price of energy is going to go up. The cheapest oil is gone and the cheapest power comes from very old power plants (nuclear, coal, or hydro). Without renewables or huge amounts of demand reduction, the utilities will have to build new plants, which will be more expensive no matter what the power source is. Comparing new fossil, nuclear, and renewable power plants, renewables will look pretty good. 3) Solar, wind, next-next gen biofuels, and geothermal look better positioned to take advantage of the other technologies that have developed over the 30 years since the last energy crisis.

But, still, it's a little hard to answer this question because it assumes that technology is just metal and silicon and engines.

Technologies are only half-machine. The rest is human. People establish the systems and ground rules that allow them to work. Arguing that renewable energy systems cost more or can't provide 24/7 power can be rhetorically effective but misses a key point: The energy system was built by and for fossil fuel use. An individual solar/wind/geothermal tech is trying to play on a field that's been designed for a different game. Wind is wearing cleats on a basketball court, let's say.

If you change the technical and financial systems — making the grid more flexible, say, or valuing cost stability more highly in economic models — then alternative energy looks better. For example, wind is totally insensitive to the price of oil and natural gas. If we think that over the next 20 years, the price of oil/gas will go up (which damn near everybody does), then wind farms look a lot more competitive with natural gas plants.

Another example would be the indemnity that the US government extends to the nuclear industry (Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act). It essentially takes a lot of risk off nuclear power plant developers' balance sheets. That makes the "cost of money" (the interest rate, basically) that these guys have to pay lower. Voila! No technological change, but the price of nuclear plants drops.

Long answer to a reasonable question, but I hope that answers it.

@Alexa: The book is coming out in Fall of 2010, but I post to the site just about every day. Would love to engage with your people, if they are interested!

Posted by Alexis Madrigal on 08/08/2009 @ 09:58AM PT
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Wow! If this is just a sample, I really can't wait to read the book. I needs me some inspiration for reporting this beat over the long haul.

Covering the climate legislation hearings in Congress, I've often heard legislators attempt to make the nuclear sector out to be a poor neglected entity because it goes largely un-mentioned in the Waxman-Markey bill. It's quite the whitewash of history.

Posted by Emily Gertz on 08/10/2009 @ 09:02AM PT
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When the OPEC oil embago took place in 1973, this country had a wonderful opportunity to rid itself of the foreign oil addiction, but Big Oil hijacked it by gobbling up all of the solar energy research and development money and doing nothing with it. We are paying a dear price for that missed opportunity today, 36 years later. We can't afford to allow Big ("Clean") Coal to hijack this one and ruin the planet all in the name of the Almighty Profit Motive. It's amazing how myopic they are--they would rather kill us all, including their own children and grandchildren, for reasons of personal financial expediency (GREED) than allow the development of wind, wave, and solar power than is pollution-free. The only carbon footprint we need is Obama's on the rear ends of Big Oil and Big ("Clean") Coal.

Posted by Jeffrey Hill on 08/11/2009 @ 02:33PM PT
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If any Global Warming complainers out there really want to do something there is a solution just waiting to be deployed:

It's called CSP-DG and it stands for Concentrated Solar Power - Distributed Generation. 95% of the commercial buildings can accept a CSP system to power all or part of the building, and the nation reduces the demand for coal fired electricity by 50% -- without any other impact.

But it will not happen unless someone is willing to *BUY* -- the complainers will not change the reality, only the laws. And the result is that everyone will pay more for inferior solutions. Sounds just like govermnent ;^)

Posted by CTYankee Aeon on 08/12/2009 @ 07:40AM PT
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@CTYankee: I'm happy that you think a technological fix is readily available. That seems like a good sign.

But where are those numbers from? Concentrated solar power requires direct sunlight and doesn't seem to work very well in places like Connecticut.

Posted by Alexis Madrigal on 08/12/2009 @ 08:02AM PT
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Hi Alexis,

That is the common misconception! The utilities and goverment have spent huge $$$ on massive powerplants. Powerplants which have an excellent redord for production and reliability I might add.

But they have ignored the niche market between 50kW and 1MW -- the individual building sized genset. Everyone focuses (no pun intended) on the thermodynamic efficiency and system uptime. That's what counts for a central powerplant.

But buildings are already served by the utility. If the day is cloudy themn the building gets its energy from the grid, just like it does today. But when the sun is shining, the power flows the other way. The utility simply generates less power, the utility burns less coal, everyone is happy.

I know this sounds like an over simplification. The reality is that solar isn't readt to produce 100% of our energy needs -- BUT IT DOESN"T HAVE TO!

The system I'm referring to was engineered in and *for* Fairfield County CT in 2001 when wholesale electricity was $50/MWH. But it works in West Texas and International Falls too.

Anyway, that's the reason I addressed my note to the complainers. There is too much misinformation out there. The government won't fix the problem, they only take half measures. Private investment wont address the problem they don't like investing in heavily regulated monopolies.

We need a few individuals possessed with extrodinary insight, clear vision, and a spirit of achievment to step up, and address their own needs. Gasp -- they might even make a profit while they do it!

Know anyone that fits that description?

Posted by CTYankee Aeon on 08/12/2009 @ 08:37AM PT
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hey........need some 4renz...

Posted by Loreen Sefo on 09/23/2009 @ 05:10PM PT
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Rediscovering the Forgotten History of clean Energy Innovation is a very interesting subject. Thank you many times over for the research and rediscoveries everyone is uncovering. Please do step back further in time to the 1890s because the solutions preceded the problems.

Nicola Tesla is the genius and the innovator of the Alternating Current system we use world wide today. Westinghouse promoted this Tesla technology with the help of the financier J.P.Morgan. Teslla believed there was an unlimited amount of energy available for free in the air around us. He proved this theory at Colorado Springs and was building a full size unit at Wardenclyffe, on Long Island to broadcast free power around the globe. At the word free J.P. Morgan pulled the financing. From that time on the side of Electrical theory that emphasized the utilization of static electricity, zero point energy, or aether energy (different names for the same thing) has been omitted from textbooks. The US patent Office considers any device claiming utilization of space energy to be perpetual motion devices and they will not issue a patent.

http://www.frank.germano.com/nikolatesla.htm is a good site to learn about Tesla's accomplishments.

Others have made accomplishments on the same technology of Scalar electromagnetic waves. http://www.cheniere.org/

Dr.T.Henry Moray

http://www.cheniere.org/images/people/moray%20pics.htm

FloydSweet

http://www.rexresearch.com/sweet/1nothing.htm

Healing of any cellular degenerative diseases (cancer, aids, viral infections and many more) by exposure to congical Scalar electromagnetic waves is a newer side of this. http://www.cheniere.org/priore/index.html

All this just scratches the surface.

Posted by Mark Knudsen on 09/29/2009 @ 12:11PM PT
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