Renewable Energy Sources

Renewable energy is generally defined as energy that comes from resources which are naturally replenished on a human timescale, such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves and geothermal heat. Renewable energy replaces conventional fuels in four distinct areas: electricity generation, hot water/space heating, motor fuels, and rural (off-grid) energy services.

Pumped storage plant - A hydroelectric power plant that stores the power in a power grid of electric generators. source

Hydroelectric power makes for 10% of the nation's energy, being channeled through turbines into a generator that then produces electricity. source

Example of bioenergy:  The Stirling Generator produces electricity from biomass combustion heat.

 

 

 

 

Biomass can be converted into liquid fuels, or biofuels, such as ethanol, which his made from starches and sugars. source

Burbo Bank Offshore Wind Farm: An example of the wind power industry that connects wind turbines to an electric power transmission network. Wind energy is an efficient, completely environmentally safe source of power. source

Nesjavellir Geothermal Power Station in Iceland. Geothermal energy is a source of heat directly from the earth. It is an efficient, cost effective source of energy but has thus far only been widely available near tectonic plate boundaries. source

Spain's Gemosolar Array is the world's first 24/7 Solar Power Plant. Solar power is used as an environmentally safe source of heat. The dish-shaped surface collects and concentrates the sun's heat onto a receiver, which absorbs the heat and transfers it to fluid within the engine. The heat causes the fluid to expand against a piston or turbine to produce mechanical power. The mechanical power is then used to run a generator or alternator to produce electricity. source

Using ocean current energy as a thermal or mechanical power source is very much still in the early stages. There are none currently in commercial use, but the rendering of under-water turbines above are models in progress, and while eventually be used commercially. source

Conversely, devices for harnessing tidal energy are moving further along in development and near commercialization. source

A row of modern wind turbines next to it's predecessor: the water-pumping wind mill.source

Electrification

     Electrification is the process of powering by electricity and is usually associated with changing over from another power source.Broadly speaking, electrification was the build out of the electrical generating and distribution systems which occurred in the United States, Britain and other countries from the mid-1880s until around 1950 and is in progress in rural areas in some developing countries. This included the change over from line shaft and belt drive using steam engines and water power to electric motors.

In 1870, Thomas Alva Edison succeeded in producing a working prototype of the electric incandescent lamp. source

In the 1830's Michael Faraday discovered the operating principle of electromagnetic generators. The principle, later called Faraday's law, is that an electromotive force is generated in an electrical conductor that is subjected to a varying magnetic flux, as for example, a wire moving through a magnetic field. His innovations, like the first electromagnetic generator (seen below), offered vast contribution to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry, and kick-started a series of experimentation and invention in electric power.

Faraday disk, the first electric generator. The horseshoe-shaped magnet (A) created a magnetic field through the disk (D). When the disk was turned, this induced an electric current radially outward from the center toward the rim. The current flowed out through the sliding spring contact m, through the external circuit, and back into the center of the disk through the axle. source

The steam turbine generator developed in 1884 by British engineer Charles Algernon Parsons provided a smaller and more efficient alternative to the steam reciprocating engine. Parson's generator lead to a revolution in marine propulsion, and was a predecessor to today's turbo-generators. source 

 

 

 

 

In 1913, a company using Edison as it namesake secured rights with his patent on electricity transmission technology and built 83 mile long power line from Santa Ana to Los Angeles and carried electricity across Southern California. source

The City of Los Angeles saw its first municipal electricity on March 30, 1916 when the Bureau of Power and Light installed its first power pole on the corner of Pasadena Avenue and Piedmont Street. source

The Brush postmill in Cleveland, Ohio, 1888. The first use of a large windmill to generate electricity. source

Advertisements for the Paris-Dunn Manufacturing Co. wind power technology. In the 1930's and 40's the business found an eager market across the U.S., powering everything from farm generators to motor-driven washing machines. source

First REA pole setting on John Hammans farm, May 15, 1938. source

Christening 100th Electric Irrigation Well. Left to right: Ruby Snyder, Dorothy Oliver, Charles A. Palmer, Superintendent, Buffalo County REA. source

By the 1930's, 90% of urban dwellings were powered by electricity, but in rural areas, only 10% had access. Electric power was controlled by private business, and thus much of the rural population either could not afford or were too isolated from urban power lines to get power. In 1935, the Rural Electric Administration (REA) was formed in the hope that government involvement would provie elctricity, and thus improved lifestyles for rural peoples. By 1939 the REA had helped to establish 417 rural electric cooperatives, which served 288,000 households. The actions of the REA encouraged private utilities to electrify the countryside as well. By 1939 rural households with electricity had risen to 25 percent. While the REA  undoubtedly had its benefits in rural areas, they were not able to stop the large amounts of families relocating to the cities, or the evolving culture of family farms.

Music in the Aftermath of World War I

Having been inspired by the poem, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, by American poet Walt Whitman, which had been written as an elegy to Abraham Lincoln, Gustav Holst composed his Ode to Death, for choral and orchestra in the wake of World War I. It is now seen by many as Holst's most beautiful choral piece.

Music in the Aftermath of World War One

During the Great War, British composer Edward Elgar had composed several pieces meant to rally the spirits of the British people, including a series of patriotic songs called Fringes of the Fleet, with words by Rudyard Kipling. Nothing in these pieces were to suggest the severe change the Elgar sound would undergo as the war went on, but in the aftermath of the war, battling sickness, depression, and loss, Elgar's severely changed outlook on life was all to evident in his first major composition following WW1, his 2nd cello concerto.

Cotton Textile Industry in 19th Century Egypt

Egyptian cotton has always been viewed as a superior example of the good. source

Muhammad Ali, known as the father of Modern Egypt, set in motion much of the industry and outer communication with Western world. His monopolization of the Egyptian market motivated the full embrace of cotton production, which became Egypt's most profitable good during this period. source

In the 19th century, Alexandria offered something of a hub for cotton traders, where they could meet, and exchange the various types of cotton amongst themselves, a scene that was known as the Alexandria Cotton Exchange.

The Bourse housed the Alexandria Stock Exchange, that thrived in 1880's to the early 1900's. source

 

 

Mohammed Ali Square which housed the stock exchange, became the symbol of the city and of the nation's economy. source

 

 

On-foot cotton transport in Egypt. source

Barge loaded with cotton source

Cotton trade's super teensy archives of export. source

Outside the Café de l'Europe in Place des Consuls, in Alexandria, where cotton traders would meet and discuss. source

Plantation Systems of the Colonial Period

Initially, the Europeans sought purely gold and silver in their ventures to the New World, but once there, the adventurers found other resources that their home lands desired just as much.Gradually the Americas were colonized by various nations, and they implemented plantation systems that hastened and organized plant growth, and the utilization of the native peoples as laborers.

The Europeans settled in the Caribbean and on mainland America. The Spanish settled Jamaica, Cuba and Hispaniola, amongst other islands. In 1607 the English established a colony on the east coast of America, named Virginia. In 1623 and 1625, they settled the islands of St Kitts and Barbados in the Caribbean. In 1655 the British took the island of Jamaica from the Spanish.

The first major plantation systems began in Brazil by the Portuguese. It was a very gradual process, beginning in the 1530's, with several false starts of colonizing, and finally finding a foothold in the mid 16th century, in sugar plantations. The Portuguese would in fact not begin gold and silver mining in Brazil, their initial intention, until the 18th century. Thousands of African slaves were brought to the Americas for the Portuguese plantations, the rest of the forced labor was subjected upon by natives or mixed-race "mulattoes".

Portuguese map (c. 1549) showing the natives carrying Brazil wood and the Portuguese ships. Brazil wood was one of the first natural resources the Portuguese began extracting from the colonized land. source

In this view of the chief sugar region of Brazil, the river traces a map-like course, dividing the composition in half: the fort, the city, and the fields on the right are all shown from above. The scene of sugar processing (lower right) is dominated by an edge runner—the most primitive type of wheeled sugar mill used in the New World. The circular motion of the mill is animated through the repetition of its form across the composition—in the swirls of smoke coming from the boiler and from the huge fire in the distant mountains. source

A Dutch painting of a Brazilian sugar-producing farm (engenho) 17th century. source

Jamaica was perhaps the most broadly organized plantation system during this period. By 1700 Jamaica was awash with sugar plantations and Jamaica's population was comprised of 7,000 English to 40,000 slaves. The sugar industry grew quickly in Jamaica -- in 1672 there were 70 plantations producing 772 tonnes of sugar per annum -- growing in the 1770s to over 680 plantations. By 1800, it was 21,000 English to 300,000 slaves, which increased to some 500,000 slaves by the 18th century. In 1820 there were 5,349 properties in Jamaica of which 1,189 contained over 100 slaves. Each estate was its own small world, complete with an entire labour force of field workers and skilled artisans, a hospital, water supply, cattle, mules and horses as well as its own fuel source. Each plantation fueled the wheels of British mercantilism. 

By the early 17th century, the popularity and demand of tobacco had spread throughout Europe, and the European colonialists sought tobacco production in the Americas. The meticulous process of picking the placement of the seedbeds, and the growing of the plants that would eventually grow to be 6 to nine feet tall, was hard graft. Weekly cultivation fo the growing plants, protecting them from weeds and cutworms and other insects that put this precious plant at constant risk of disease, was required to successfully run a tobacco plantation. This was an example of the classic use of heavy slave labor in the fields.  

Slaves working on a tobacco farm in Virginia. source

A 1758 map of the island Hispaniola. The Spaniards colonized this island in the early 16th century. source

This map of Antigua, a British possession from 1632, shows plantations and mills as well as towns, churches and forts. The names of the landowners are indicated and, all over the island, English place names (Falmouth, for example) illustrate how the British attempted to mark their domination on the land. source

A Map of the most Considerable Plantations of the English in America. 1700.

Illustration of a three-roller sugar mill. Two slaves thread the cane through in front and back of the rollers. Working long shifts during harvest, slaves were always at risk for losing fingers or worse in the rollers. The path of the cattle and attendant slaves in their endless journey around the mill forms a circle that orders the rest of the vignettes showing various stages of purification.Two scenes on the right suggest a positive relationship between masters and slaves. In the lower right a slave looks out and smiles at viewers to engage their attention. Behind him a white man looks solicitously at a slave carrying a bundle of cane. source

 

This plate appears in a manual designed for new planters in the French colony of Cayenne. It contains two plans that offer idyllic visions of sugar plantations styled after a French country estate. On the left, the elaborate birds-eye plan includes a chapel and an olive grove, as well as a sugar mill and a cattle pen. The stress is on opulence and order: most of the estate is bounded by fences and organized by trees and paths set in straight lines. Like a French chateau, there is a formal garden, replete with ornamental fountain, next to the planter's house. The second plan (small, but still including a large formal garden) emphasizes surveillance: everything is organized along a narrow axis and the text states that all activities take place under the master's eye. source

Another resource that was utilized by the colonizing European was rice. The colonies of South Carolina depended largely on rice cultivation and prospered high amongst the colonies and native England for it product. The potential of rice production was discovered in the early 1700's, and since the Europeans knew little or nothing about the grain, they desperately sought out West African slaves who had originated from rice-growing regions for any chance of a successful harvest. Plantation owners paid extra for slaves from specific regions of Africs and eventually the organization rice plantations of South Carolina mirrored the traditional systems of the African slaves that worked the fields.

South Carolina's advertisements for desired labor were far more specific than most colonial slave ads. They required trained slaves from certain parts of Africa in order to have any chance of a successful rice harvest; South Carolina's economy depended on it. source