Interesting Renewable Energy Questions on Quora

Here’s one on “Alternate Histories (Hypothetical Historical Scenarios)” What would the world look like today if fossil fuels never existed? Without access to abundant cheap energy from fossil fuels could a society have developed using different technologies that would allow them to support a population and level of affluence similar to that in the west?

Ryan Carlyle, BSChE, Subsea hydraulics engineer, whom I greatly admire, answers:  It seems likely that civilization would repeatedly advance and collapse at the “whoops we chopped all our trees down” stage. There are a few examples to support this. Deforestation to plant cropland and produce mortar for pyramids was arguably a major contributor to the collapse of the Mayan civilization. In the UK, the enormous consumption of wood for heating, cooking, and producing charcoal was entirely unsustainable until coal exploitation grew rapidly to relieve pressure on forests…..(he continues on with a very well-conceived response)

My Answer: I suppose Ryan is largely correct, as usual. Having said that, humankind has been harvesting wind energy for thousands of years, so there is a chance that our species wouldn’t have waited until the late 20th Century to begin developing that source further.  We’ve also been concentrating solar power for many hundreds of years (at least).

A parallel question of perhaps even greater relevance is this: if we didn’t have all this fossil fuel infrastructure and the enormous profit stream that accrues to it, what sort of energy resources would we tap into? The only answer is renewables. We’d look at the fact that we receive 6000 times more power from the sun than we need, and we’d say, “OK, let’s build a solution that harvests 1/6000th of that power.  Shouldn’t be too tough.”  And it wouldn’t be.

Of course, the fact that we DO have all the physical, the economic and the political aspects of all this fossil fuel infrastructure doesn’t mean that building such a solution has made the technology hurdle associated with renewable energy any higher; it only means that creating the political will is a real challenge, though it’s one that our civilization must overcome if it expects to endure.