Guest Post by Ed Zuiderwijk,
About a year ago I read in a Dutch national newspaper an article which elaborately and somewhat aggressively argued that if you had the choice between, say, a 1000MW gas-fired power plant and a few thousands windmill generators the latter was the way to go. It was full of the phoney arguments and broken reasoning well-known to readers of this blog, and was, of course, palpable nonsense. I had a good laugh about it; you can’t argue with purveyors of foolishness and, furthermore, when you know something is utterly wrong it is usually completely uninteresting to precisely analyse why. I had almost forgotten about it when some conversation with friends brought it back to my attention and made me question (myself) why it was that I knew with such total clarity that the argument put forward in that article was piffle given that I know not much more in depth about the subject than your average informed layman. After some reflection I realised that it was because of something I was taught many years ago at school. That’s what this posting is about.
I attended primary school in the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands, a medium size town going back over 750 years and having quite a bit more pedigree than its namesake in the US. Located some 20 km west of Amsterdam, Haarlem had (and has) its fair share of museums (footnote 1), several of which were on the list of school outings. One of these is the Museum Cruquius, located a few miles to the south of the town centre. The place had a lasting effect on the young lad. The exhibition is about the draining (and conversion into a polder) of the Haarlemmermeer, ‘Lake Haarlem’, at the time (about 1850) a substantial inland body of water inside the triangle formed by the cities of Amsterdam, Haarlem and Leiden. The museum building itself is one of the original three pumping stations that emptied the lake and has the original massive steam-driven pump, still in working order. Nowadays the exhibition does a slick multi-media presentation, but then, the late 1950s, you had the thing as it was, basic but very imposing.
What was this lake and why was it drained? That there were lots of shallow lakes in a place called Holland (‘low land’, footnote 2) is no surprise but Lake Haarlem had over the centuries shown a habit of growing, to encroach on the land and gobble up adjacent waters. In particular after a south-westerly gale the damage to its surroundings could be considerable (and irreversible). By the early 1800s it had become a threat to the city of Amsterdam itself and on occasion to Leiden as well. The idea to ‘reclaim’ Lake Haarlem had been proposed several times since the 17th century but it had never been attempted in earnest. One consideration had been that it was at least 5 times the size of anything tried earlier, which would have required an extraordinary number of wind-mill powered pumping stations.
In the 1830s controlling the lake had become a matter of urgency. The government, on instigation by king William I, convened a royal commission to investigate and make recommendations. Mind you, that same king was also a driving force behind the rapid early development of the country’s railway system and with it the Industrial Revolution in the Netherlands; royalty nowadays just don’t do that sort of thing anymore. Not surprisingly the recommendation was to drain the lake, but with steam-driven pumps instead of windmills.
So, how do you do that, drain such a lake? It had been done in Holland since the late 1500s and in particular the early 1600s when several smallish lakes and peat bogs to the north of Amsterdam had been turned into farmland. With the expertise acquired in those and subsequent projects it was well established knowledge how to go about it. The first part of such a project is the easiest and mostly straightforward. You can’t just put a pump on the water and start pumping. Not only is there no outlet for the large quantities of pumped water, even if you succeed in lowering the water levels the lake will refill in no time from the groundwaters of its surroundings, thus drying out the adjacent lands. Bad idea. So what you do is to construct a dyke going around the lake a bit inside its boundary. The waters outside of this ‘ring dyke’ then become, after some further dredging, a relatively narrow canal where the water will be kept at the original lake level. This way you solve three problems at once: the canal still has the original outlets that the lake had so you can dump the pumped water in it, the groundwater level in the surrounding lands is unaffected and you have a controlled waterway for bulk transport. With that dyke in place (3) you can start pumping. And that was where the real problem was with Lake Haarlem.
The pumps used until then were primarily of the paddle wheel type or Archimedes screws driven by windmills if there was enough wind. The engineers had figured out that they would need a really large number of such units, somewhere between 150 and 200, spread out along the odd 60km of dyke and that it would take at least 5 years but more likely a decade to complete the job. The costs of such an operation would be colossal, not mentioning the logistics of it. It would make the project technically unfeasible and economically unaffordable. However, in the 1820s an aristocrat (again!) and member of the senate, Frans Godert baron van Lynden, had written a treatise proposing the radical idea of using steam-driven beam pumps. He knew how the water was kept out of Cornish tin mines in faraway England by using an advanced design of such pumps. A delegation went to Cornwall to have a look and, being competent engineers, they realised in no time that three of such pumps were indeed a much, much better proposition than the odd 200 windmills.
The specially designed pumps were acquired from a company in Plymouth. The engine’s (steam) cylinders were more than 3.6 meter diameter, that’s bigger than my kitchen. They were placed in purpose-built pumping houses, named after pioneering hydro engineers of the past, van der Kruik (aka. Krukius) and Leeghwater and (of course) Lynden. It took three and a quarter years to drain the lake. Afterwards only one was kept in its original state. And this is why the worlds largest vertical steam engine still in existence is found hidden in a small museum in an unremarkable corner of Holland.
When I read that newspaper article about a power plant versus thousands of windmills I knew at once it was nonsense because what its author essentially claimed was that those engineers of the 1840s had had it all wrong, that they should have used windmills instead of steam. The notion is just preposterous. Methinks the 150000 people dwelling on what once was the bottom of Lake Haarlem ought to be told and asked for an opinion, whether they would rather keep their feet dry with windmills or with pumps powered by gas and oil(4).
Are there any take-away messages in this story? Perhaps. One could be about the ‘nonsense detector’ in each of us. How does it work? I consider myself to be a skeptic, but how do I know when to be skeptical and when to acknowledge expertise? If the mechanic tells me that my car doesn’t go because the fuel pump has died I accept that without hesitation. When I discuss the increasing failings of my physique with my doctor I will carefully consider his or her diagnosis. But if some pundit tells me that I need to get my electricity from renewable un-reliables because of whatever, then the alarm of my nonsense detector sounds big time. Why? It appears to me that we as individuals know more than we know we know. That mostly forgotten knowledge and experiences we picked up in life somehow linger and at times emerge to inform and trigger that alarm. In this case I recognised the nonsense not because of some in-depth analysis but because of a completely different look at the matter based on a specific experience.
Nevertheless, an essential aspect of being a skeptic is to not only scrutinise the subject but, most importantly, yourself as well, why you reason the way you do. In this case, why am I certain that those 19th century engineers had it spot on?
It is a matter of geometry, really. The surface area of a lake, and therefore the quantity of water to be shifted, increases with the square of its cross-section, but the space available for the pumps (at the dyke) grows only linearly. This means that the bigger the lake, the more windmills you need. Not just more but more per kilometer of dyke at an increased density. Since you can’t put windmills arbitrarily close together because they catch each other’s wind there is, consequently, a limit to the number of them that can be accommodated. That means that there is a limit to the size of the lake that you can manage using windmills. Lake Haarlem, requiring the odd 200 pumping stations was close to that limit, if not over it: it was too big for the technology of the past. That was the fundamental reason for it not having been tried before. A straightforward way of putting it: by the 1800s the windmill based technique had become obsolete and the engineers knew it. That was some 2 centuries ago. That technological concept, therefore, most certainly is obsolete today.
The idea of going back to wind power for our base-load energy provision is a massive retrograde step, a devolution, an indirection. Don’t be mislead by the shiny modern look of the turning beasts, courtesy of being made of metal and composites. That’s what Americans call: lipstick on a pig. Underneath it is essentially a medieval technology and we are in danger of learning the hard way that it can’t replace power generation from a primary source – coal, gas, nuclear and hydro – with a much higher energy density than wind can ever deliver.
Notes:
1) If you ever find yourself near the place pay a visit to Teylers museum. It’s a small natural history cum science museum old style with only natural light for illumination and a marvellous collection of science related paraphernalia.
2) The Netherlands has 12 provinces. The name Holland specifically denotes the two provinces adjacent to the North Sea and to the north of the delta formed by the rivers Rhine, Meuse and Schelt.
3) My paternal ancestor Emmanuel Zuiderwijk (six generations between us) of Lisse, a village on the west side of Lake Haarlem, was one of those labouring on the construction of the ring dyke, using only a shovel and a wheelbarrow.
4) The Dutch national airport Schiphol. It is located in the north-east corner of the Haarlemmermeer polder. The name was in use for that part of the lake since well before. It translates as ‘ship’s hell’ because it was the corner where vessels were stranded and often wrecked in serious stormy weather. I always found it somewhat ghoulish having an airport named after a graveyard and sometimes wonder how passengers would feel about it if they knew.
Some urls with more info:
https://www.haarlemmermeermuseum.nl/en/cruquius-museum–world-largest-steam-engine
https://www.asme.org/about-asme/engineering-history/landmarks/153-cruquius-pumping-station
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haarlemmermeer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaas_Kruik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Leeghwater
https://www.teylersmuseum.nl/en
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they could have done it with windmills if they hired one don quixote for each one of them.
Unfortunately, Don Quixote was non compos mentis, AKA “barmy in the crumpet.” Last I checked, the final score was Windmills 1, Don Quixote zip. Choose your battles carefully.
Nice article Ed, interesting, well written and makes perfect sense. I have passed through Schipol many times since 1971 on my way to join oil tankers as an engineer for Shell, they used KLM charter flights , so was fascinated to learn the origin and meaning of the name.
The meaning of Schipol strikes a chord. Some years ago I departed Schipol in a twin-engine Boeing 777, the first twin ever certified for trans-oceanic service. About twenty seconds after takeoff there was a bang and I saw black stuff leave the starboard engine I sat behind. I also noticed we stopped climbing and accelerating, not usual. I whispered to the woman seated next to me that we would not be going home that day, and she looked puzzled. A minute later the captain announced we were returning to Schipol on one engine! Heads popped up at that news and a few women cried out. Later we learned the engine had ingested a cormorant. The captain said we would slowy turn around over the North Sea to dump fuel, and not to be alarmed by the fire trucks along the runway, which he assured us were only precautionary. The feeling of being in a wide-body filled with some 300-odd people and having only one engine was like being dangled by a thread. I figuratively kissed the Dutch ground when we egressed.
Great article. I am Canadian but met Dutch friends in Portugal and visited them in Haarlem 25 years ago. Lovely place but now I wish I had known about the pump and the museum. I did visit the Van Hals Museum and admired his paintings and much of the art work.
Thank you, I have learned something new today.
Great little article, Ed…….thanks!
I’ll certainly remember that little bit of history, too, next time I transit Schiphol
Great story.
Great article, Diolch.
Great story, and well written. Seems to me that the belief in science, and ‘experts’ has become almost like a religion. With ‘experts’ being the new clergymen, and “the science” the new holy bible. Most people are perfectly capable to understand issues without being ‘expert’. So often I hear from people around me the phrase “Oh but I don’t know, I am no expert”, or “How would you know? are you a climatologist/virologist/****ist?”. Common sense is underrated.
Great article, I’m really interested in the 1615 construction of the Old Bedford canal, and the New Bedford which helped drain East Anglia and I believe a Dutch engineer was in charge of the project. Amazing what we could achieve 400 years ago. Look forward to your next article.
You’re referring to Vermuyden’s Drain. What little I know about his exploits is that he apparently learnt his trade working on the polders to the north of Amsterdam that I mentioned. I’m not sure why he decided to go to England but one reason, not sure if it’s true, could have been that he had had something going with the wife, or perhaps the daughter of the chief engineer and had to flee. In any case, the motto of the county of South Cambridgeshire: ‘niet zonder arbyt’ is unadulterated 16th century Dutch and translates as ‘nothing (comes) without work’. You can’t get more calvinistic than that.
When I was at college in Cambridge (at Trinity and a long time ago) we had a really old lifetime fellow called Mr Binnie, who had a stock after dinner lecture called “The Draining of the Fens”, complete with slides of original pictures and photographs from I guess the nineteenth century.
The evidence is everywhere here (lots of dykes and drainage canals) and I believe we owe a lot to those Dutch engineers! The low lying land that was released is incredibly fertile and we grow a great deal of the UK’s food in this region.
you also owe a lot to the Scots Jacobite prisoners of war used as forced labour…
They chose poorly.
Ed,
RENEWABLE UNRELIABLES is a priceless comment.
I will start using it in my articles.
As you know the bureaucrats love them so much, they bestow endless subsidies on them.
In New England, US, the cost at which a wind owner sells to a utility is about 9.5 c/ kWh
That owner would have to sell at about 18c/kWh, if all subsidies were removed.
However, owners of other generators, usually gas turbines, have to vary their outputs to counteract the unreliable/random variations of wind, which means more Btu/kWh and more CO2/kWh, plus the the rest of the grid has to be expanded and upgraded to connect all these wind turbines and to deal with their variable outputs.
None of these costs are charged to owners of wind turbines, as otherwise the fantasy of low-cost wind would become extinct. They are charged to ratepayers, taxpayers and added to government debts.
The other unreliable renewable is solar, which is useful mostly during midday.
It dozes off and goes to sleep in late afternoon.
It wakes up around mid-morning the next day.
Again, almost 50% of its costs are reduced by subsidies.
Plus it has DUCK-curves, which put extreme burdens on the grid to be dealt with by owners of other generators.
There is a book by vermuyden entitled the draining of the fens?
Some of my ancestors were Dutch brought over for projects like that
Excellent article. I have believed for a long time that there ought to be a class taught in schools called ‘Reasoning’. It would teach children how to parse information, how to logically dissect it and place it into the context of known knowledge. A bit like the training detectives and lawyers get, but simple and practical. Also, there would lots of discussion of logical fallacies and how to spot them in the wild.
While I totally agree with your point, finding instructors/teachers to teach it will be really hard to find. They certainly won’t be found in our current schools.
“a class taught in schools called ‘Reasoning’.” There used to be. It was also called “Logic”. I went to a UK Grammar School. A “State” institution, ultimately run by the local County Council, not a “Public School” which meant private, fee paying. Some of the staff were easy-going, others were absolute tyrants, but all of them demanded that their students learned to think. Being willing to think, and make an effort to determine sense from nonsense, was paramount. Now we have the opposite.
Agree the principle, not sure about the method.
Critical thinking — which essentially is what this is — is not for everybody because some people just aren’t “built that way”. But I would certainly agree that high schools should encourage mental exercise (brain training?) an awful lot more than they do.
Given that the Education sector is captured by the Left, the last thing they would want to do is teach the children how to think!
Im starting to believe that the main mission of my closing years will be ensuring my grandchildren are able to think for themselves.
Also occurs to me – how many of those Dutch emigres were due to religious intolerance? Wasn’t Netherlands under the sway of the Catholic Spanish at the time? Genuinely interested if that was the case, if anyone has knowledge. One side of my wife’s family were of Huguenot stock, fled France to England around that time.
Ken the A/C “expert”
Andrew,
I was married to a wonderful teacher who over her career taught in both elementary and high school. One of the classes she taught she called “thinking outside the box”. It was really a class in logical thinking. She used puzzles and games to stimulate critical though. She taught in private church schools so logical thinking was encouraged. I fear today you would be hard pressed to find a teacher that could teach such a class and even harder to find a school where it would be approved.
Thank you I will reference this article when I argue against the wind fallacy.
Thanks for a very interesting read. It’s a nice combination of my 2 favourite subjects: history and science. It’s a real pity that the people pushing wind & solar don’t care or understand either of these subjects and will just ignore any facts contrary to their viewpoint.
I never knew how the Dutch drained their land – thanks, Ed.
Now if the entire population of the United Counties of Holland (archaic!) would leave, there’s a few swamps all over the World for them to drain for a generous fee.
Those beam engines must’ve been terribly expensive back then. I wonder how the cost would’ve compared to ~200 windmills? I’d imagine that’s a calculation the Dutch used to be able to make, but an ability the rest of us apparently have lost.
The Netherlands started off as the Republic of the 7 Provinces.
Sometimes called ‘The United States’.
=============
Thanks Ed. Indeed a delightful story of much wisdom.
You certainly do not need a bevy of letters after your name to reach sensible conclusions. All you need is curiosity and good look at the history of how humanity coped in the past.
As a keen sailor throughout my life much of that curiosity involved both wind and water, how they interacted and how to take advantage of the energy they provided.
Stepping back, all one needs to do to assess articles on current wind power is to look at how the maritime industry dealt with the problem, some 150 years ago.
The answer stares you in the face and applies equally today when considering the “Ship of State”.
But it’s the “Ship of Fools” one has to be wary of.
Yes, it’s just the internal ‘BS detector’. There are usually many clues that set the needle twitching.
Any known entrenched opinions and the character of the author/publisher. The motive. Why has someone chosen to write a justification treatise?A preemptive defence (like the preemptive denial of a crime because of a guilty conscience), a rebuttal to another article, to discredit an opponent, to make a short or long term career/financial gain. For peer group approval, to promote their own ego/image?
Such articles are usually full of emotive appeals, smokescreens, straw-men , diversions, superficially convincing facts and statistics that are easily pulled apart by the curious, but meat and potatoes for the expected credulous audience.
In essence it is just obvious when the author is just trying to hard – exhibiting confirmation bias, arguing from a point of extreme prejudice. You only have to bail hard when you are on a sinking boat, not sat on solid ground.
But then some people are sheep, others are too busy with their lives to care (the boiled frogs), but others are instinctively curious and inquisitive – it is innate when told something to ask “is that really so, how can I double and triple check” .
And people do have/develop a sixth sense, maybe instinctive, but also subconsciously a result of your life’s experience and knowledge.
Wow, your comment just described your comment.
I bet that sounded so witty in your head…….
Oscar Wilde and the painter Whistler were at a dinner party when Whistler said something witty that had everyone falling about with laughter.
Oscar Wilde then said “Oh, I wish I had said that”, to which Whistler replied “You will Oscar, you will”.
“Your Majesty is like a stream of bat’s piss.”
Carl Jung once said: “In each of us there is an ʘther whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude…”
Freud once said something too, I expect, and a bunch of other people too.
Thanks, great story/history lesson to start off the day. When a steam piston reaches the end of its stroke the steam is released, producing a loud pop. The size of the steam pistons in this story means that there was a lot of noise generated by this process, but well worth it.
Ron
I’d guess those engines would likely have had efficiency improvements like exhaust condensers etc to reduce the fuel bill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine
As I understand it, MOST of the power produced by this type of engine comes from the vacuum created by condensing the exhaust steam. The primitive boilers of the day weren’t capable of operating at much more than a few pounds per square inch, so this alone wasn’t enough for useful power.
But still more efficient than the inefficient windmills of the day, as proven by the actual work the old ancient inefficient steam engines actually did. Just imagine what we could get done nowadays if the world had the work ethic and brains of the good Dutch peoples, and unencumbered by tribalism and politics. The Dutch feed more people per capita and land base than any other nation on the good Earth.
While that was true of the Newcomen engine and the Watt engine that came after it, the subsequent improvements by, for example, Trevithick, relied more and more on high-pressure steam. High-pressure steam would be admitted into the cylinder for about a quarter or a third of the stroke, and would then be cut off, with the steam expanding for the rest of the stroke against a vacuum on the underside of the piston. At the end of the stroke, a valve would open linking the spaces above and below the piston. The weight of the pump rod in the mineshaft (or a counterweight if the pump was not used on a mine) would pull the piston back up to its starting position, and the now low-pressure steam above the piston moved to the underside. Then another valve opened to a separate condenser, condensing the steam under the piston and creating a vacuum, ready for the cycle to start again. Such a design was known as the Cornish engine, and was used to pump out mines all over the world. It was also used in many civil engineering projects, such as the water-works at Kew Bridge in London which held six Cornish engines, the largest having a piston diameter of 100 inches.
The engines used to drain the Haarlemmermeer were of slightly different design, in that it had two cylinders concentrically arranged. The inner cylinder, 84 inches in diameter, received the high-pressure steam to the underside for about half the stroke, after which the steam was cut off and the rest of the stroke was expansive. At the end of the stroke, the connecting valve linked the two sides of the high-pressure piston, and also to the top side of the concentric low-pressure cylinder, 144 inches in diameter, and the steam continued to expand. The concentric space below the outer cylinder remained under vacuum all the time.
The three Haarlemmermeer engines were built by Harvey’s of Hayle, a small Cornish town only five miles from my home. Very little now remains of the foundry. This image shows the first cylinder cast http://cruquiusmuseum.nl/EN/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/cylinder.jpg It was actually mis-cast, because at the time their combined furnaces weren’t able to feed enough molten iron fast enough to fill the mould. The faceplate of the lathe used to turn the cylinders and pistons of the engine was nearly 20ft in diameter.
@ur momisugly Chris Hogg – thanks for the detail about Trevithick’s design – it sounds like an early form of compounding, which became the virtual default for large stationary and marine engines, and even in smaller applications, such as traction engines.
Chris Hogg. Thanks for this. It is interesting and knowledgeable comments like yours that make WUWT a must read each day.
A further factor in the drainage of fenland is whether the fen is peat or sand based.
Peat based fen such as there is in East Anglia is subject to shrinkage and oxidation once it is drained. When Holme Fen was drained in 1848 a cast iron pillar was driven into the clay subsoil with the top level at the level of the peat. Initial shrinkage was about 22 cm per year, and now the pillar has about 4 metres showing above the ground. There is about 2 metres of peat soil left above the clay subsoil.
Thank you Sir for your logic and commons sense. Rare commodities indeed.
Our minds fill up with ‘stuff’ and that stuff provides context against which ideas can be evaluated. That evaluation happens mostly in the right hemisphere of the brain. The left hemisphere is the one that mostly handles language and logic.
If someone’s right hemisphere is disabled, that person will believe anything as long as it is not self-contradictory. link
The big problem in western civilization right now is that our schools train us how to use logic and language and almost entirely ignore evaluation against context. That’s how cultural Marxism has taken over the universities. Evaluated against what people would call common sense, cultural Marxism is complete crap. As long as academics can stay in their ivory towers and ignore the real world, their enhanced logic and language skills can allow them to believe the ridiculous.
So, getting kids out of the classroom and into museums is very important. Of course, the left wants to abolish history so people won’t have any knowledge that might contradict its precious theories.
As I have said before, using wind power to do “work”, in this case to make electricity, is 4th – 6th century technology. Then coal was discovered!
Various renewables enthusiasts keep claiming that wind and batteries are new technologies and that therefore we can expect huge increases in efficiency in coming years.
Modern wind turbine designs operate at a peak of around 75% of the Betz limit (the peak theoretical efficiency of 16/27ths) over a relatively narrow band of wind speeds. That’s around 45% of the energy in the wind overall, or 12/27ths. Below that band perhaps matters less in that the energy that can be extracted is proportional to the cube of the wind speed, but matters more in the sense that if you rely on wind for a large fraction of your energy it doesn’t help that the efficiency if extraction drops, even to zero at the cut in speed. Above the design capacity of the generator, efficiency drops off rapidly, as none of the extra energy is captured (blades are increasingly feathered), despite rising with the cube of wind speed – and beyond cutout speed, when the generator is disconnected for safety reasons, once again output drops to zero.
Reminds me of the story of England’s (and possibly the world’s) first and only wind powered cotton mill
https://stockportheritagetrust.co.uk/2016/01/18/edward-street-mill-windmill-excavation/
Located on a hill near the old Town Hall it was built at a time when other mills in Stcokport were water powered. However a few years later it converted to steam power , even though steam powered mills were a very recent innovation. There must have been a reason , after all coal , although from nearby Poynton , has to be paid for, whilst the wind of course is free ( as we keep being told).
The price of coal in the Manchester area dropped dramatically when the canal system came on-line. Before, it had to be transported by horse and cart. After, bulk transport on barges slashed the transport cost. The Aston canal opened in 1799, the Peak Forest canal, not far away, in 1800, but earlier the Bridgewater Canal had already had a massive effect on the affordability of coal.
If anyone is visiting the Manchester area in the post-Covid time (if that ever happens) Worsley Delph is worth looking at. The start of the Bridgewater Canal , which cleverly used underground canals inside the Worsley coal mines to link to the Bridgewater, all at the same level, this has been recently restored as a vistor attraction.
http://est1761.org/worsley-delph-0
As Ed says , it more than halved the price of coal to domestic users and the factories in Manchester.
This goes for anygood of worth. Slash transport costs and prices drop and demand surges.
So next to zero transport cost is worth pursuing then.. anyone heard of the Internet?
Both coal and wind are ‘free’ but that is not the issue. The real issue is the cost of converting their energy into a useful form. At that point considerations like ‘economy of scale’ and ‘energy density’ kick in as governing parameters to the economic rubric and lo and behold, larger scale processes using hight energy density inputs are more efficient and more reliable. Fuzzying up that simple, straightforward logic and replacing it with pea and thimble rhetoric and emotive voodoo is hardly truly ‘critical’ thinking.
So the big question is, in my opinion, how the heck did we drift so far off the track of the Enlightenment?
Personally I blame the audio visual media, from TV to the on line ‘influencer’ cess pits now so common, drifting to some sort of new melodramatic/burlesque style where it is all about the presenter and their facial expressions and hand movements that ‘sex up’ utter drivel on any range of topics, ‘climate change’ just being one of the go to bandwagon issues.
So called ‘science communication’ has also drifted into this new genre and thereby degraded science itself in much the same way PR consultants and elected official’s media managers have degraded the broader public discourse.
The really odd thing is that TV could be a great medium for scientific education. Indeed, it was in the days of OU lectures broadcast freely, and some of the programmes presented by James Burke. A tradition now lost.
In the UK they have their Beam Engine museum in London near Kew Gardens. With over a dozen machines – many working, including a 90 inch and a 100 inch pump, it’s a great day out for the kids…
https://waterandsteam.org.uk/our-engines/
Fred Dibnah’s age of steam video series.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3MVcoadDxOeBwSqWWiILN2lf3BGMyVFU
Very interesting and entertaining
Great article in so many ways.
When I lived in the Netherlands (1998 to 2005) I often passed Pumping Station Cruquius, but never knew it was turned into a museum.
During 3of the years I lived there, I crisscrossed the Sparne river and the ring canal around Hasrlemmer Meer in my small motor boat. Such a great experience.
Regarding Schiphol .
The runways are 4 meter or 12 feet below sea level.
Therefore: fasten your seat belt and hold on to your hat!
Great article – I must look up that steam engine if ever I am in that vicinity.
As regards the “project” try that today and you would be committing “suicide by red tape”.
Unless of course you promised to do it with windpower to placate the eco-nuts.
Either way it would never be accomplished.
But, but, but, if you cost-shift and punish Big Carbon enough, and with enough in subsidies, wallah, wind becomes cheaper. It’s like magic! Right Griff?