Our energy transition

After the American Century

We are living in the midst of an energy transition, shifting away from fossil fuels to solar, wind, biomass, and other forms of alternative energy. The price of solar power has been dropping rapidly during the last five years, and is now a cheaper source of electricity than windmills and more importantly, cheaper than coal. The price differences will become even larger, as new R&D keeps finding greater efficiencies, and manufacturers achieve economies of scale in production.

Danish windmills

The energy transition is taking place most rapidly not in the nations that were dominant in the old oil-coal-gas energy regime, such as the United States, but rather in nations which do not possess many fossil fuel resources but do have lots of sun, wind, or thermal heat.  Chile, for example, has all three of these, and will soon be supplying most of its energy needs from windmills along its long coastline and solar installations in the large desert region in the north. When I visited Chile last year to attend a conference on energy transitions, I heard many people talk about the vast exports of energy that were possible, too, once high tension lines reached into other South American countries.  Iceland is a leader in thermal heating and thermal electricity, and sunny Portugal is also rapidly becoming a player in alternative energy. 

Old fossil fuel economies are not as quick to change, and they are behaving in quite different ways. Germany has invested heavily in solar and wind power, creating thousands of jobs, and its official policy is to close nuclear plants and get rid of fossil fuels as soon as possible. Britain seems unable to give up nuclear power as a fantasy solution, but meanwhile is muddling through and headed toward more alternative energies, though not with the same pace and determination as Germany. France has long invested heavily in atomic reactors, and of all the nations in the world, has the greatest dependence on them. 

The United States is divided, on this as on everything else these days. Some states, notably California, Massachusetts, and New York, are acting like Europeans, becoming more energy efficient, while investing in alternative power. In contrast, the Deep South until quite recently has invested almost nothing in alternative energies, and uses about twice as much energy per capita as the three states just mentioned. The Federal government is rather schizophrenic, with programs from the Obama years designed to increase energy efficiency and move toward wind and solar power, but run by Trump appointees who are undercutting the programs. Meanwhile, Trump is a strong supporter of the fossil fuel industries, particularly coal. One hopes he will be the last such president, for the long term health of the American economy depends on making the transition quickly, rather than lagging behind. Interestingly, some "red"states in the western US that usually vote Republican are nevertheless rapidly adopting wind mills, because their region happens to have steady, strong wind. This is in contrast to the American South, while has good sun but little wind except for that blasts of hot air coming from its politicians.

China is investing heavily in alternative power systems, and more recently India has begun to cancel plans to build new fossil fuel electrical plants, choosing alternative energies instead. The change is driven by falling costs at least as much as by environmental idealism.

How long will this take? Based on previous energy transitions, which I have studied, the shift in energy regimes takes at least 30 years, normally. But in the past the changes were driven by prices and the comparative versatility and convenience of different sources of power. For example, in factories steam power was not as flexible as electrical power. On the other hand, in 1910 gasoline engines were more convenient on the whole that electric motors to power automobiles, because batteries were not good enough. That problem seems to be all but solved, now, but it took more than a century.  How long will the transition as a whole take? Perhaps only a decade or two more in countries that are really trying to make the change, like Portugal and Chile. Sadly, the US, once a leader in the transition to fossil fuels and again a leader in electrification, is falling behind. The Republican Party is largely responsible, but the Democrats also share some of the blame. US energy policy has been a battlefield for decades. 

The big question is whether in the world as a whole the transition will come quickly enough to overcome the destructive effects of global warming. Since the current US government has adopted the policy of denying the reality of climate change, our hopes will have to rest with the US state governments, thoughtful corporations that shift to energy efficiency and alternative energies (such as Apple), and most importantly, other nations. In this particular area, we do seem to be living "after the American century."  

For anyone interested, I wrote about the earlier energy transition from gas to electricity as the source of lighting in a book that is about to be published, American Illuminations  MIT Press, 2018.

Why the Assembly line emerged in 1913 in the US

After the American Century

The American Assembly line is now more than one hundred years old. Exactly when to mark its birthday is a little in doubt, as the experiments that led to the assembly line began at the Ford Motor Company in April 1913 and the managers had no name for the emerging system until after it emerged. That spring and summer automobile parts were assembled on some short, experimental lines. In September Ford prepared to do final car assembly. The new form of production had become a conscious goal. Workmen were strung out in a line, on an October day, with the cars moving past each work station, and it turned out to be far more efficient than previous methods.

The American Assembly line is one hundred years old. Exactly when to mark its birthday is a little in doubt, as the experiments that led to the assembly line began at the Ford Motor Company in April 1913 and the managers had no name for the emerging system until after it emerged. That spring and summer automobile parts were assembled on some short, experimental lines. In September Ford prepared to do final car assembly. The new form of production had become a conscious goal. Workmen strung out in a line, with the cars moving past each work station, turned out to be far more efficient than previous methods

The assembly line seems in retrospect to be an obvious technology. Why didn’t the manufacturing technique of subdividing the tasks of production and lining them up in the order of assembly emerge much sooner? There are many interconnected factors that explain why the assembly line emerged when it did and not before, but three were particularly important.

First, parts much be absolutely interchangeable, or else they do not fit together. Machine tools that made parts had to be extremely accurate before this was possible. Eli Whitney envisioned the advantages and convinced Thomas Jefferson to support his efforts to make identical parts for muskets. However, American armories and other manufacturers such as those making sewing machines struggles for most of the nineteenth century to achieve the precision necessary for an assembly line.

Second, in order to arrange machines and processes in an assembly line order the source of power must be extremely flexible. This was not the case in steam-driven factories, where power came steam pipes and from from overhead line shafts, belts and gears. The further steam was from its source, the less powerful it became. As a drive shaft and gear system grew longer, more and more energy was needed just to keep it turning at all. The power train in such a factory was not flexible, and therefore steam power was not well suited to experiments in manufacturing design. In contrast, electric motors, furnaces, and lights could be placed anywhere, and machines in an electrified factory could be placed in any order desired.

Third, an assembly line is expensive to set up, and it makes no economic sense to invest so much capital in one unless a large market exists, a market willing to purchase a single product.  The United States developed such a mass market, in contrast to Europe, where trade barriers balkanized the market. In France, Britain and Germany, there was a “class market” that demanded differentiated products that appealed to different segments of a smaller pool of consumers.  After 1914 European manufacturers visited Detroit to study the assembly line, but few industries could build comparable factories because Europe was not yet a mass market.

Aside from these three factories, an assembly line required sub-division of the labor into tasks of equal length, which deskilled much of the work force. It demanded that workers repeat a few actions, and annual Ford employee turnover rose to over 300 percent in 1913. In response, the company introduced the $5 Day, doubling the average wage. Not only did the higher wages keep people on the job, but workers with higher wages could afford to buy the products of mass production.

By the early 1920s half of all the automobiles in the world were Fords, Henry Ford was a billionaire, and his factory workers were among the highest paid in the world. Thus emerged a system of production that almost miraculously was able to increase production, raise profits, and pay higher wages, all at the same time. Henry Ford’s ghostwritten My Life and Work became an international bestseller. It briefly seemed that the assembly line would lift humanity to a new level of leisure and prosperity. The Boston department store owner, Edward Filine declared.

Mass production is not simply large-scale production. It is large-scale production based upon a clear understanding that increased production demands increased buying, and that the greatest total profits can be obtained only if the masses can and do enjoy a higher and ever higher standard of living. For selfish business reasons, therefore, genuine mass production industries must make prices lower and lower and wages higher and higher, while constantly shortening the workday and bringing to the masses not only more money but more time. . . .         Edward Filene, Successful Living in This Machine Age, 1931

The story of the assembly line in subsequent decades was not quite what Filene imagined, for it was also an efficient method for producing tanks and bombers. Moreover, as the assembly line was adopted worldwide it often drove down wages rather that raising them. In the Cold War, the assembly line became a symbol of American prosperity, yet at the same time many feared technological unemployment. Meanwhile, Japanese corporations reinvented the assembly line as lean production, which was then re-exported to the United States.

The assembly line is still evolving as a system of production, today largely monitored and controlled by computers and “manned” by robots. It has become inseparable from central political and social issues such as automation, unemployment, American competitiveness, resource depletion and global warming. At its centennial, the assembly line is being reconceived as a green technology based on recycling and alternative energies.

These and other topics are further explored in America’s Assembly Line.

Technology: Blackout Behavior and Hurricane Sandy

New York, 1965 Blackout

After the American Century 

The blackouts that came in the wake of tropical storm Sandy left millions of people without electricity. These blackouts reminded Americans once again about how dependent they are on the current that runs silently into their homes, offices, and factories. As recently as 1965, when a major blackout shrouded the entire Northeastern United States in darkness, it was easier to cope with the crisis. Many typewriters were still manual, and the New York Times still had enough of them to write up the news and get it out the next day in a special edition that was printed in New Jersey, where the power remained on.  Back in 1965 important information was not stored on hard disks, and computers still had magnetic tapes. Then, the effects were most dire for travelers caught in airports, in subway tunnels, or on the high floors of buildings.

In 2012 computers are embedded in billions of devices, all of which require electricity. Even those that run on batteries need to be recharged after a short time. Some New Yorkers who have electricity proved willing to share it with complete strangers, letting them charge their cell phones, computers, and other devices, often for free. This generosity was not an isolated phenomenon, but is characteristic of what happens in a blackout. Generosity and helpfulness seem to break out on all sides. Unfortunately, journalists often miss htis side of blackouts, because they are looking for danger, death and destruction.

Widespread power failures only became possible after the development of regional grids of electrical service in the late 1930s and 1940s. As society increased its dependence on electricity, blackouts presented ever-greater problems, especially in hospitals, like that at NYU in 2012, when backup generators failed, and all the patients had to be moved elsewhere through the flooded streets of New York. Doctors and nurses gave selflessly to help their patients, for example by operating equipment manually, when this was possible, until it could be plugged in again. In the streets themselves many restaurants grilled neat and gave it away to passersby, most of whom could not cook in their dark apartments, rather than let the meat rot in rapidly thawing freezers.

As in 1965 and almost every other blackout, people talked to neighbors they hardly knew and helped total strangers. Blackout are a break in time, a semi-magical moment when the clocks literally stop and ordinary life cannot go on, when people discover a common humanity too often obscured by the demanding pace of contemporary life. When the Lights Went Out (MIT, 2010) explores the experience of blackouts, beginning with their World War II military necessity, including a wide range of reactions, ranging from exuberance and playfulness to riot, arson, and looting.

Yet most commonly, Americans have responded to blackouts by reaching out and helping one another. When thrust outside their cocoon of electrical conveniences and communications, they discover how much they share. In 1965, a woman returned home to her apartment near Union Square and found all the neighbors gathering in the only flat with a gas stove. Neighbors who had seldom spoken brought to one another out choice items from their suddenly dead refrigerators for an impromptu party and established friendships that persisted for decades. 

To its surprise, the Office of Civil Defense found that fear was not a widespread reaction to the 1965 blackout and that when fear was the first response it did not prove contagious. The investigators were surprised, because "projection of one's own fear on others is a fairly well-known phenomenon which has been experimentally induced." Instead, it found a "contagion of joy."

Technology: Electrifying America

After the American Century

 A few months ago, MIT Press singled out my Electrifying America as one of 50 books to celebrate as part of an anniversary event.  I was asked to prepare a short reflection on the book, which appears below.

The late 1980s was a good time to reflect on and analyze electrification, a process that had begun in the 1880s and been completed in my childhood. When I took up the subject, electricity had become "natural" but it was not difficult to recover its recent novelty. I was also experienced enough, with three previous books (on Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and General Electric), to realize that this was a wonderful subject and to know how fortunate I was to start work with the encouragement of a contract from MIT Press.

I researched Electrifying America when there was still no email or Internet, although I proudly wrote on a new word processor (with no hard disk). Most documents had to be gathered in libraries and archives, which was less a hardship than a pleasure. Where could I better get a sense of the early electric light than at the Edison National Historic Site? I did research in Muncie Indiana (better known as Middletown) to understand how it had adopted electricity. Likewise, I studied the electricity-mad Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, where it had been held in 1901. Such experiences gave me an invaluable grounding in the material culture of my subject.

That grounding stretched back to my childhood. I often visited my grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, which, when I first was there, lacked electricity. I also glimpsed the pre-electric world among the Amish and Mennonites whom I encountered while growing up in central Pennsylvania. During summers in Boston, I delighted in streetcars, and pestered my father to take me for rides, demanding to know how the system worked. A mechanical engineer who had co-authored a book about steam-power plants, he explained to me elementary mechanics and electrical machinery. Decades later he was still teaching me when we discussed sections of Electrifying America in draft form. By then, I was also teaching him some social and cultural history. They are at the center of the book, which fuses my education in American Studies with an understanding of technical details and an immersion in specific places. It proved to be the longest and perhaps the best of the eight books I have written for MIT Press, though an author always likes to think the next book will be the best one. (My America's Assembly Line will appear with MIT Press in spring, 2013.) 

Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology received a full-page review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review in September, 1991, and that December it was named a Times Notable Book for the year. It won the 1991 Abel Woolman Award from the Public Works History Association, and in 1993 it received the Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. It is still in print.

When the Lights Went Out

After the American Century

I am delighted to inform readers that my new book,
When the Lights Went Out: 
A History of American Blackouts 
(MIT Press, 2010)
has received some attention from the Blog of The New Yorker.

The official publication date is March 31, but in fact it is already available.

The REA and Obama's Health Care Plan

After the American Century


As debate rages in Washington about how to reform the health care system, it might be useful to look at another government program that stepped in to help people who were not being served by the private sector. The program I have in mind was created 75 years ago and has been a great success. Roosevelt called it the REA, or Rural Electrification Administration.

How is this like heath care? Back in c. 1935 roughly 90% of rural people lacked electricity. Private power companies said it cost too much to build lines out into sparsely settled areas, and farmers often did not use that much electricity even if they had it. As with health care, 25% or more of the population lacked an essential service.

Whenever a politician suggested that government step in to provide this service instead, however, he or she was immediately denounced as a socialist or a communist or an unrealistic dreamer. But the REA was created, providing power to rural people, which had important health implications. With electricity, dairy farms could become more hygienic, for example, and all farms could have refrigerators, washing machines, and hot running water. Farmers also had fewer accidents, because they did not have to manoeuvre in the dark with a lantern in one hand. But to keep the focus on the fiscal bottom line, the rural electrical cooperatives as a group proved to be a good investment. The loans need to start them up were paid back, and the rural coops have not become a permanent burden on the federal government, not least because farmers gradually used more electricity.

The analogy with health care admittedly is not perfect, but note that the Obama idea of creating a public health care option is not so different from the idea of creating a public electricity option. In each case the plan is that people will pay their own way, but without unnecessary costs. Indeed, one reason that President Franklin Roosevelt wanted the REA (and also the Tennessee Valley Authority) was to find out what electricity really ought to cost. The public programs became a yardstick, measuring real costs for service, disciplining the private companies.

One more important point. When the REA was created, the Republican Party denounced it as socialistic, and predicted the demise of private power companies. In fact, the private power companies continued to grow all through the Great Depression, and today they still control the vast majority of US power generation and transmission. The REA has also prospered, and there really is not much debate about this any more.

Similarly, if Obama convinces Congress to create a basic health plan that any American can choose to have, private health care will continue to flourish. There will always be people who want to buy more elaborate care in fancier waiting rooms with less waiting time. But the point is that, as with the REA, everyone will have access to an essential service.

Just as the REA made farmers healthier and more productive, universal health care in the United States will make the nation healthier and more productive. The Obama plan could also save a good deal of money. The US consumer pays far more per capita for health care than the Dane or or the Dutch or the Norwegian or the German consumer. Almost twice as much, actually.