What percentage of US energy was provided by Renewable energy in 1949?

[NNadir]

Here is a pie chart detailing the contribution of various forms of renewable energy in California



http://www.eia.doe.gov/fuelrenewable.html

The US as a whole is not California, but it is illustrative of the forms of energy in that market.

California is often thought to be on the leading edge of the renewable trend, and has been so for many decades. When we think renewable, proponents ask us to think future, future, FUTURE.

But renewable energy is not really new. It's been around as long as the United States. During the American Civil War, for instance, most American railroads were fueled by wood. The internal combustion engine had not been invented, and the coal age was really just beginning.

We often hear about the grand renewable future today and we hear these numbers like "by 2015" x percent of the energy in will be produced by renewable energy. Sometimes figures like 20% or 30% are bandied about.

In 2004 renewable energy accounted for about 6% of US energy consumption. Of this 6%, 44.5% was represented by hydroelectric, and 45.5% was represented by biomass, probably mostly wood and municipal trash burning. Geothermal provided 5% of the renewable market and wind (2%) and solar (1%) brought up the rear.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table1.html

I happen to have stumbled across the numbers for the renewable energy market in 1949, when nobody was worrying about global climate change, peak oil or any of that other stuff.

I invite you to hazard a guess. What percentage was provided by renewable energy in 1949?

To be clear, I am referring to US energy production, and not consumption, although interestingly, in 1949 the difference between energy production and consumption in the US was less than 0.2 (quads/exajoules). The US was energy independent then.

[Selatius]

1. We still had a functioning mass transit system then

By the 1960s, most of the street cars were removed off of city streets and replaced by an army of taxi cabs and diesel buses. Also, the interstate highway system didn't exist in '49. American cities built after the interstate highway system are built around the car and not pedestrians or street cars. As a result, you have vicious urban sprawl that ruins the countryside and simply aggravates the pollution problem. You cannot get around without having a car, and on top of that you have to pay for insurance out of pocket, maintenance out of pocket, and the car note if it's not yet yours. With mass transit, you pay a fraction of the cost out of pocket in the form of taxes because many people are paying for maintenance of a much smaller fleet of mass transit vehicles.

[Dead_Parrot]

2. Hmmm... interesting...

If we're including wood it should be quite a bit, and I think there used to be a lot of smallish hydro schemes that are now scrapped. I'll plump for 40, but a pure guess.

:popcorn:

[jpak]

3. Yawn...

:rofl:

[Dead_Parrot]

6. How can you yawn while rolling around?

That's quite a trick...

It is a question well worth considering - in days of yore, people did not use NG furnaces to heat their houses in winter, settling instead for a wood fire and/or a nice woolly sweater.

Just because we've forgotten how to do something doesn't mean it wasn't important...

[jpak]

9. Historical trends in US energy use are well known and widely available

It's no Big Secret.

In 1950, wood supplied 3.3% and hydro 4.3% of US energy, respectively...

www.p2pays.org/ref/08/07351.pdf

and the contribution of nucular?????

zero...

so yeah.....yawn....

:)

[Dead_Parrot]

11. Contribution of solar - also zero...

:hide:

[jpak]

12. Not if you include wood and hydro

and the first practical solar cells weren't available until the mid-1950's...

http://www.pvresources.com/en/history.php

[Dead_Parrot]

13. Ahh, well, If we're playing that game...

The first nuclear power plants weren't built until the mid-50's either. :P

And don't even get me started on where sunlight comes from. ;)

[NNadir]

15. One of the first applications of solar cell use was Pioneer 1, in 1958.

The satellite was intended to orbit the moon, but it failed.

Pioneer 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 all failed as well.

Pioneer 6 attained earth orbit, solar cell and all, in 1965 and was last contacted in 2000 to celebrate 35 years of spaceflight. The spacecraft at that time was the oldest continuously operating spacecraft.

The solar cell was fully operating at that point, thus proving that even after the 20 year warranty on solar cells is up, the cell still functions. (This is a good thing, because NASA has misfiled the warranty documents, and would not have been able to get new solar cells installed by Home Depot certified solar technicians.) The solar cells are "off grid."

Meanwhile the crappy nuclear powered Pioneer's 10 and 11 no longer return data, way out more than 70 A.U. from the sun, after flying by Jupiter and Saturn, giving humanity its first close up views of these planets.

These craft were powered by plutonium. Chimpco. Cheney. LOL. What a crock.

Both spacecraft had pornographic depictions of a man and a woman.



God was angry about this and caused the Pioneer 11 crappy nuclear power system to shut down in 1995.

God caused humanity to take a way funding for Pioneer 10 in 1997, and no further contact was made with the spacecraft for many years. Atheist satan worshiping types in NASA did contact the spacecraft in 2002 to celebrate its 30th anniversary. The craft at that point was more than 70 A.U. from earth and was studying the heliopause, which is different than menopause.

These spacecraft suffered from some damage from Jovian (gasp, terror) radiation belts, which are 1000 times stronger than the (gasp, terrorist, Chimpco) radiation belts around earth. These radiation (Bush, LOL, GOP) belts showed that radiation is a bad thing, and god help us if terrorists ever get their hands on Jupiter. If they did get their hands on Jupiter, there is enough radiation there to wipe out entire countries.

Contact the spacecraft in 2003 was something of a remarkable achievement for the atheists, since the power of radio transmissions, like solar radiation, follows an inverse square law. The power output of the spacecraft was 165 watts when launched. After 30 years, about 1/4 of the plutonium-238 (Cheney, Chimpco) in the RTG's had decayed to U-234.

[NNadir]

7. LOL. Chimpco.

And now, to kick the shit out of the solar future:


:hide: :hide: :hide: :hide: :hide: :hide: :hide: :hide: :hide: :hide: :hide: :hide:

(gasp)


Exajoule!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Some people scare easily.

[Warpy]

4. Are you also including animal energy?

I can still remember old guys in horse drawn wagons in the early 50s, collecting old pots and pans, rags, scrap wood, and whatever else they could repair or sell to outfits that recycled that stuff (the rags went to high quality paper).

My guess is that among water power, hydroelectric power (and remember, the demand was a hell of a lot lower), animal power, and wood for heat, that number's pretty high.

[NNadir]

5. No.

[megatherium]

8. Somewhere not long ago I read that some farmers

have recently discovered that using organic farming using horse power actually produces more for the cost than using synthetic fertilizers and farm machines. Whether we could support 300 million Americans using traditional technology, I wouldn't know.

I live in southern Indiana and occasionally, I see Amish farmers in their black horse-drawn carriages.

[Dead_Parrot]

10. Probably...

The two major obsticles are:

A) Manpower. With lots of machines and chemicals, something like 95% of the US's food production is produced by around 1% of the population. Without the chemicals and machines, you'd need more like 70% of the population to be involved. Looking at Europe in the middle ages should give you an idea. The Amish live quite happily without the benefits of A/C, cyberporn and quadbikes, so it's not impossible.

A) Getting the soil back to a natural state. This takes, IIRC, about ten years from when you start treating it properly to when it gets back into full productivity: That's ten very hungry, non-profit years. A smart farmer with the resources to do it would start this process now, as they'll be raking in cash at the end of it, but most farms these days are run by corporations who can't see past the end of the next quarterly report.

[depakid]

14. I guess it depends on how you define renweable

Provided that there are responsible forest practices in place, wood and other forest products are renewable. Cut beyond sustained yield, erode soils, create arroyo's, etc., and we're no longer talking a renewable resource. Moreover, on the bablance sheet- forests provide other valuable ecological services. So the straight up energy tradeoff from say, burning wood or making charcoal results in faulty accounting.

The literature is replete with civilizations that collapsed due primarily to deforestation, overly-intensive agriculture and related problems.

Also, the trouble with looking back in time is that we tend to forget the basis of society consisted of less complex relationships and simpler means of production and commerce. Under those circumstances, a little energy went a lot farther in terms of basic needs. Not to mention, of course, that there were a lot fewer mouths to feed.

Going back to Grandma's energy budget is not something that this society is even remotely prepared to do-

[NNadir]

16. The answers can be found in this fascinating link:

http://eed.llnl.gov/flow/pdf/ucrl-tr-129990-02.pdf

The tables therein give the history of energy in the United States in the period between 1949 and 2002.

In percentage terms, 9.3% of US energy was provided in 1949, by renewable energy, almost all of it by hydroelectric power, wood, waste (garbage) and alcohol.

Looking over this, and the other fascinating tables and charts we see that geothermal energy produced it's first industrial entry in 1960. Solar and wind entered the market, albeit on a trivial scale, in the early 1980's.

Renewable production in absolute terms (quads/exajoules) peaked in 1995, when the renewable energy provided 7.131 quads (1 exajoule = 1.055 quads) or 7.5% of energy. By 2002 this output had declined to 5.899 quads.

Since 1949 up to 2002 renewable energy production has been dominated by hydroelectric and the burning of wood and waste and alcohol. At no point in this period did the three forms of energy that get the most public attention, wind, solar and geothermal combine to produce a single exajoule of energy in the United States.

Solar energy peaked in 1996 at 0.071 quads and had decreased slightly to 0.064 quads by 2002.

With the exception of 1998, wind energy has been montonically increasing and as of 2002 was providing 0.106 quads of energy.

[rfkrfk]

17. California is a parasite, their power comes from other states

Not everyone can import power.

when forced to fend for themselves {late '90s}, Ca. chose
the easiest and most expensive solution available,
natural gas

California, the 'pollution elsewhere' state

[NNadir]

18. It is true that California imports large amounts of electricity.

In 2002 they imported about 50.0 million megawatt-hours.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/california.pdf

All of the states bordering California exported electricity.

Arizona exported 28.5 million megawatt-hours.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/arizona.pdf

Nevada exported 2.9 million megawatt-hours.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/nevada.pdf

Oregon exported 1.2 million megawatt-hours.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/oregon.pdf

Mexico exports considerable electricity as well, about 14 million megawatt-hours, although it is unclear how much goes to California.

California also gets electricity from states it does not border.

In the case of Arizona, it produced more electricity (30.8 million megawatt-hours) at Palo Verde nuclear station than it exported.