Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [30]
Climate change and increased fears over national energy security have countries turning back toward local, renewable energy sources. The backwater research field of wave power has received a tremendous boost of interest in the last decade. Twelve wave power companies now have prototype machines ranging in size from 5.5 kilowatts all the way up to the 750-kilowatt Pelamis “snake.”28 Furthmore, in March 2010 the United Kingdom gave licenses to a series of companies to develop 700 megawatts of wave and tidal power off the coast of Scotland. The UK Energy Minister, the Wall Street Journal reported, “described the wave and tidal industry as a ‘second industrial revolution.’”29
If the projects pan out, wave power companies will finally realize the California Wave Motor Company’s vision for what working wave motors would mean to the world. As the California Wave Motor Company prospectus argued,
Volumes might be spoke and written on the subject of what this means to the world, but the person of average intelligence can see the hand-writing on the wall if they have noted the progress of invention and development during the last thirty years. It means that a new field for investment and opportunity is opening to the world. That an epoch has been marked in the industrial development of this country. It means that the largest known source of natural energy has been tapped, and the power-house of old Neptune made available for mankind. It means that the electric current is to invade the markets of the coast countries and become a competitor with all other forms of fuel. 30
But, as it’s been for the last hundred years, no one is quite sure if the new wave machines purported to be floating along European coastlines within a few years will fare any better than their forebears along the California coast.
chapter 9
Compressed Air and Electricity
AROUND THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, transmitting power was quite difficult. In order to move power, it needed to be touching something else. Energy markets were local, so people tried to tap local resources. For those who lived on the beach, the waves sure seemed like a good bet.1
The development of high-voltage power transmission, however, changed the dynamics of power generation and usage. The ability to transmit electricity made tapping local power sources less appealing. If one could send 100,000 horsepower from a coal plant on the edge of town, why bother with a small wave or sun motor out by the pier? Transmission reshaped where and how people could live and work. As much as the fossil-fuel plants themselves, the means for transmitting electrical power that could be used for any number of things transformed the American energy system. Power went regional, and in the process, a lot of marginal green technologies fell by the wayside.
The tremendous success of this electrical generation and transmission has erased a fundamental piece of its early history: To the engineers and entrepreneurs of the time, the rise of electricity as a way of transmitting power was far from assured. One of the most fascinating episodes in energy history is the brief but intense battle between compressed air and electricity as the way to send power long distances. In just 1877, when Sir William Siemens told the Iron and Steel Institute of Great Britain that “a copper rod three inches in diameter would be capable of transmitting 1000 horsepower, a distance of say, 30 miles,” the statement “startled the audience considerably,” and “a smile of incredulity was observed to play over the features of many of his hearers.”2
An entire alternative power distribution system was even developed in France during the 1880s. If you were walking the streets of gay Paris during that time and you wanted to know the exact time, you would have looked to one of the tall, ornamented clocks that dotted the city. They looked quite like any of the clocks visitors would have known from other places,