Alfonso Alfaro’s Reviews > Energy and Civilization: A History > Status Update

Imperatives of Energy Need and Uses

Between Determinism and Choice

Then intensification of production has been enabled by the reliable supply of affordable energies and has promoted the economies of scale evident in industrial concentration.
But in a number of industries (microbreweries) a reverse movement has been under way since 1970's

What Has Not Changed?

Long Term Trends and Falling Costs

2 Early breakthroughs would accelerate the shift: swift construction of nuclear plants based on the best available designs, and the availability of new, inexpensive ways to store wind and solar electricity on massive scales.

Although the sequence of 3 substitutions does not mean the fourth transitions, now in its early stage (fossil fuels being replaced by new conversions of renewable energy), will proceed at similar pace, the odds are heavily in favor of another protracted process.

The 2 most important factors explaining the similarities in the pace of transitions are the prerequisite for enormous infrastructural investment and the inertia of massively embedded energy systems.

As long as the established sources of prime movers work well within established settings, are readily available, and are profitable, their substitutes, even those with clearly superior attributes, will advance only slowly.

Energy eras and Transitions