Vaclav Smil

A skeptic looks at alternative energy

In June 2004 the editor of an energy journal called to ask me to comment on a just-announced plan to build the worlds largest photovoltaic electric generating plant. Where would it be, I asked-Arizona? Spain? North Africa? No, it was to be spread among three locations in rural Bavaria, southeast of Nuremberg. I said there must be some mistake. I grew up not far from that place, just across the border with the Czech Republic, and I will never forget those seemingly endless days of summer spent inside while it rained incessantly. Bavaria is like Seattle in the United States or Sichuan province in China. You dont want to put a solar plant in Bavaria, but that is exactly where the Germans put it. The plant, with a peak output of 10 megawatts, went into operation in June 2005.

Food waste [Numbers Don't Lie]

The food supply of the United States comes to a little under 3,600 kilocalories per person per day. Thats supply, not consumption--and a good thing, too. · Consider that if you omit babies and housebound octogenarians, whose daily requirements are less than 1,500 kcal, that would leave more than 4,000 kcal available for adults--a quantity appropriate only for a lumberjack. Americans may eat too much, but not that much. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) adjusts these figures for spoilage and other waste and puts the actual daily average at about 2,600 kcal per person. But even that isnt quite right. Both surveys of self-reported food consumption (done by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) and calculations based on expected metabolic requirements indicate that the actual average daily intake in the United States comes to about 2,100 kcal per person. Subtract 2,100 kcal in intake from 3,600 kcal in supply and you get a loss of 1,500 kcal, which means about 40 percent of our food goes to waste. · This was not always the case. In the early 1970s, the USDA put the average food availability adjusted for preretail waste at less than 2,100 kcal per day, nearly 25 percent less than what it is now. · The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases estimates that the United States per capita food waste increased by 50 percent between 1974 and 2005 and that the problem has gotten worse since then. · But even if the average daily loss had remained at 1,400 kcal per capita, a simple calculation shows that in 2014 (with 319 million people) this wasted food could have provided adequate nutrition (2,200 kcal per capita) to about 200 million people, or almost exactly the entire population of Brazil, Latin Americas largest nation and the worlds sixth most populous country.

February 1878: The first phonograph

WHEN THOMAS EDISON DIED IN 1931, at 84, he held nearly 1,100 patents in the United States and more than 2,300 patents worldwide. By far the most famous one was his patent for the lightbulb, but he came up neither with the idea of an evacuated glass container nor with the use of an incandescing filament. More fundamental was Edisons conception, entirely de novo, of the complete system of electricity generation, transmission, and conversion, which he put into operation first in London and in lower Manhattan in 1882.

Crossing the atlantic [Numbers Don't Lie]

COMMERCIAL SAILING SHIPS had long taken three, sometimes four weeks to make the eastbound crossing of the Atlantic; the westbound route, against the wind, usually took six weeks. The first steamship made the eastward crossing only in 1833, when the Quebec-built SS Royal William went to England, after stopping to take on coal in Nova Scotia. It was only in April 1838-180 years ago this month-that steamships pioneered the westward route. It happened in an unexpectedly dramatic way. . Isambard Kingdom Brunel, one of the great 19th-century British engineers, built the SS Great Western for the Great Western Steamship Companys planned Bristol-New York run. The ship was ready on 31 March 1838, but fire damage scared most of its passengers away, delaying departure until 8 April.

Slow cycling [Numbers Don't Lie]

Some technical advances are delayed by either a failure of imagination or a concatenation of obstructive circumstances. I can think of no better example of both of these than the bicycle. . Two centuries ago, on 12 June 1817 in Mannheim, Karl Drais, a forester in Germanys grand duchy of Baden, demonstrated for the first time his Laufmaschine (running machine), later also known as a draisine or hobby-horse. With the seat in the middle, front-wheel steering, and wheels of the same diameter, it was the archetype of all later vehicles that required constant balancing. However, it was propelled not by pedaling but by pushing ones feet against the ground, Fred Flintstone fashion.

Diesel engine at 120 [Numbers Don’t Lie]

On 17 February 1897, Moritz Schroter, a professor of theoretical engineering at Technische Universitat, in Munich, conducted the official certification test of Rudolf Diesels new engine. The goal of the test was to verify the machines efficiency and hence to demonstrate its suitability for commercial development. . The 4.5-metric-ton engine performed impressively: At its full power of 13.4 kilowatts (18 horsepower) the engines thermal efficiency was 35xa0percent and its mechanical efficiency reached 75 percent, resulting in a net efficiency of 26 percent. With obvious pride Diesel wrote to his wife, Nobodys engine design has achieved what mine has done, and so I can have the proud awareness of being the first one in my specialty. Later in that year the engines net efficiency reached 30 percent, making the machine twice as efficient as the gasoline-fueled Otto engines of the day.

Thank Maxwell for cellphones [Numbers Don't Lie]

Now that the world has become addicted to portable electronics, billions of people have come to see the companies providing these gadgets as the most innovative, and the people who head those companies as the most exalted, of all time. Genius is a starter category in this discussion. . But clever and appealing though todays electronic gadgets may be, to the historian they are nothing but the inevitable fifth-order elaborations of two fundamental ideas: electromagnetic radiation, the theory of which was formulated by James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s, and miniaturized fabrication, which followed Richard Feynmans 1959 dictum that theres plenty of room at the bottom.

Unemployment: Pick a number [Numbers Don't Lie]

Many economic statistics are notoriously unreliable, and the reason often has to do with whats included in the measurement and whats left out. Gross domestic product offers a good example of a measure that leaves out key environmental externalities, such as soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and effects of climate change. . Measuring unemployment is also an exercise in exclusion. Casual consumers of U.S. economic news are familiar with only the official figure, which put the countrys total unemployment at 4.8 percent at the beginning of 2017. But that is just one of six alternatives used by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to quantify labor underutilization.

Transformers, the unsung technology [Numbers Don't Lie]

Ihave always disliked exaggerated claims of imminent scientific and technical breakthroughs, like inexpensive fusion, cheap supersonic travel, and the terraforming of other planets. But I am fond of the simple devices that do so much of the fundamental work of modern civilization, particularly those that do so modestly, even invisibly. . No device fits this description better than a transformer. Nonengineers may be vaguely aware that such devices exist, but they have no idea how they work and how utterly indispensable they are for everyday life. . The theoretical foundation was laid in the early 1830s, with the discovery of electromagnetic induction by Michael Faraday and Joseph Henry. They showed that a changing magnetic field can induce a current of a higher voltage (known as stepping up) or a lower one (stepping down). But it took another half century before Lucien Gaulard, John Dixon Gibbs, Charles Brush, and Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti could design the first useful transformer prototypes. Next, a trio of Hungarian engineers-Otto Blathy, Miksa Deri, and Karoly Zipernowsky-improved the design by building a toroidal (doughnut-shaped) transformer, which they exhibited in 1885. Though it worked well, its winding was difficult to make.

Planet of the cows [Numbers Don't Lie]

For years I have tried to imagine how Earth would appear to a comprehensive and discerning probe dispatched by wonderfully sapient extraterrestrials. Of course, the probe would immediately conclude, after counting all organisms, that most individuals are either microscopic (bacteria, archaea, protists, fungi, algae) or very small (insects) but also that their aggregate weight dominates the planetary biomass. . That would not be really surprising. What these tiny creatures lack in size they more than make up in numbers. Microbes occupy every conceivable niche of the biosphere, including many extreme environments. Bacteria account for about 90 percent of the human bodys living cells and as much as 3 percent of its total weight. What would be surprising, however, is the picture the probe would paint of the macroscopic forms of animal life, which is dominated by just two vertebrates-cattle (Bos taurus) and humans (Homo sapiens), in that order. . Unlike the extraterrestrial scientists, we do not get an instant readout. Even so, we can quantify cattle zoomass and human biomass (anthropomass) with a fair degree of accuracy. The numbers of large, domesticated ruminants in all high-income countries are known, and they can be reasonably estimated for all low-income and even pastoral societies. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations puts the global cattle count at about 1.5 billion head in 2015.