But if you're stuck in the tropics where coal isn't available and before oil is begin widely used, your only choice would be solar energy. And once you start refining solar-thermal technology to improve efficiency and start coming up with other ways to use it, I feel like it would create a positive feedback loop that could lead to running industry based on a practically infinite source. Imagine where we'd be if we had started seriously investing in solar energy in the 1800s.
AHC: Renewables-fueled Industrial Revolution
- Thread starter Fabius Maximus
- Start date
But if you're stuck in the tropics where coal isn't available and before oil is begin widely used, your only choice would be solar energy. And once you start refining solar-thermal technology to improve efficiency and start coming up with other ways to use it, I feel like it would create a positive feedback loop that could lead to running industry based on a practically infinite source. Imagine where we'd be if we had started seriously investing in solar energy in the 1800s.
None of the great powers have a climate that would facilitate the development of a solar steam engine. In most of Europe and America it would only work for a few months of the year at best. An engine that only works when the weather is nice is useless for industrial purposes.
Someone explain to me how you invent a heat engine that doesn't rely on fire without the guy next to you going 'you know, starting a fire would make it so much simpler.'
Not to mention that it kinda skips a few iterative steps in the whole process.
Not to mention that it kinda skips a few iterative steps in the whole process.
Yeah, we'd need a medieval or maybe renaissance POD which would result in a europ-screw so that great powers could arise elsewhere.
Well, you'd probably start with wood-fired heat engines, and then once wood gets scarce, the choice becomes to either import coal or use solar power.
I'm thinking of southern India as the location of ttl's industrial revolution, although that's only because I'm a kim Stanley robinson fan and that's where it happened I'm years of rice and salt
It's
Banned
No. We wouldn't know how to renewably power an IR now, never mind in the 18th century.
The IR occurred because of economic imperatives, which precludes nearly all renewable energy sources, then as now.
Flocculencio
Donor
Kerala has lots of potential for hydropower (in a TL where Travancore remains independent it could industrialise on hydropower in the late 19th C) but the trouble with solar and South India is the monsoon which would make sunlight access patchy throughout a third of the year.
As DominusNovus points out, burning stuff is a lot more intuitive.
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You might have some success, actually, if electrical engines develop before steam engines.
I don't think it would be ASB for solar powered steam engines to be invented before 1850. The technology isn't the problem. What it need is a sizable industrial base powered by hydro/biomass in a area with no coal and high solar insolation.
And to somehow keep that technology isolated from any areas that *do* have fossil fuels.
You also have the fact that a lot of the early electricity research was tied to the power outputs of steam engines. As an experimental set up, you have something you can turn on and off. I imagine it'd be hard to do the basic research with an inconsistent kind of power.
Also, Swahilli is a trade language, not an ethnicity (I think).
The people who speak it as a native language also have a unique culture from their neighbors so I guess it's kind of both a language and an ethnic group.
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
The trick is to get the economic conditions for an industrial revolution in place in a place where non-renewable resources remain less economical.
Could an intrepid Chinese entrepreneur start a plantation of fast-growing bamboo trees to power a factory?
Just don't have the energy content to run modern industry or even older industry. Also coal for example provides higher quality heat even if it had the same energy content because coal burns hotter.