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There are alternatives. It won't be as easy or as cheap, no, but windmills and nuclear plants can both be built with WW1-era technology.

dredmorbius 7y ago
WWI-era technology was built on coal, and fueled by oil. The amount of fuel required to smelt iron and produce high-quality steel (a technique only perfected in the 1860s -- previous high-quality steels such as Damascus and Japanese tamahagane were forged rather than smelted, with the iron and carbon impurities literally hammered out, often by hand. Water- or wind-driven trip-hammers could help with this. Given the mass of raw wood needed to produce charcoal used in both iron and gunpowder production, the embodied mass of wood represented in an age-of-sail ship of the line (typically 72 cannon, half of which would be engaged in a broadside) rivalled or exceeded the mass of the ship itself. That's not "the cannon and powder weighed more than the ship", but "the fuelwood consumed in producing these weighed more". Britain, never particularly lush in forests, had stripped itself bare, and relied on imports from Sweden and the Americas to build and fuel its ships. Coal, particularly coked coal, was a game-changer. Even today, 15% of all coal use is "metalurgical", which is to say, coked coal used in steel production, not merely providing fuel to the fire, but chemically bonding with iron. And that's just steel. The concentrations of ores from which other metals are smelted are tremendously reduced from pre-industrial times. Copper (virtually all electric transmission and motors), gold and silver, numerous vital and strategic minerals (look up the "Harbord List", dating to WWI, of strategic minerals, now encompassed in the US Strategic Mineral Reserve and successor programmes), and more. If we can avoid shutting off the grid entirely, some elecrical substitution may suffice. Aluminium smelting is virtually fully electrically-based, and steel recycling (which doesn't require coal) can and does run in electric arc furnaces. Vaclav Smil's books on energy, Energy and Civilisation, and materials, Making the Modern World, are very strongly recommended.

dredmorbius 7y ago

WWI-era technology was built on coal, and fueled by oil. The amount of fuel required to smelt iron and produce high-quality steel (a technique only perfected in the 1860s -- previous high-quality steels such as Damascus and Japanese tamahagane were forged rather than smelted, with the iron and carbon impurities literally hammered out, often by hand. Water- or wind-driven trip-hammers could help with this. Given the mass of raw wood needed to produce charcoal used in both iron and gunpowder production, the embodied mass of wood represented in an age-of-sail ship of the line (typically 72 cannon, half of which would be engaged in a broadside) rivalled or exceeded the mass of the ship itself. That's not "the cannon and powder weighed more than the ship", but "the fuelwood consumed in producing these weighed more". Britain, never particularly lush in forests, had stripped itself bare, and relied on imports from Sweden and the Americas to build and fuel its ships. Coal, particularly coked coal, was a game-changer. Even today, 15% of all coal use is "metalurgical", which is to say, coked coal used in steel production, not merely providing fuel to the fire, but chemically bonding with iron. And that's just steel. The concentrations of ores from which other metals are smelted are tremendously reduced from pre-industrial times. Copper (virtually all electric transmission and motors), gold and silver, numerous vital and strategic minerals (look up the "Harbord List", dating to WWI, of strategic minerals, now encompassed in the US Strategic Mineral Reserve and successor programmes), and more. If we can avoid shutting off the grid entirely, some elecrical substitution may suffice. Aluminium smelting is virtually fully electrically-based, and steel recycling (which doesn't require coal) can and does run in electric arc furnaces. Vaclav Smil's books on energy, Energy and Civilisation, and materials, Making the Modern World, are very strongly recommended.