Long read of the day

On a day when GM is getting ready to launch its first all battery powered electric car we find this article at The Oil Drum about fossil fuel use during the Middle Ages. Really worth a look when you get the time. A quick excerpt:

Our romantic image of the Middle Ages and Renaissance as a paradise of renewable technologies results largely because of our failure to distinguish between thermal and kinetic energy. The Dutch and the Flemish, who dominated the Western European economy from about 1100 to 1700, are famous for their impressive use of wind technology, which took off in the 1100s.

The most spectacular use of windmills appeared in Holland from the late 1500s (16th century) onwards. There, the Dutch applied wind power to a wide range of industrial processes, including paper production, wood sawing, glass polishing and cement production. (See the article: "Wind powered factories: the history and future of the industrial windmill").

The industrial windmill was a marvel of pre-industrial technology, but it explains only partly why Holland became the most important economic power in the world during the 17th century. While sustainable providers of power, windmills could only deliver kinetic energy. To give just one example: you can use wind power to polish glass, but you can't make glass using a windmill. For that, you need thermal energy. And in pre-industrial times, as the history books tell us, the only way to reach high temperatures was to burn wood.

One problem, though: virtually all forests in the region had long vanished by the 1600s. Yet, during the Golden Age of the Netherlands, the Dutch not only made glass, they also produced bricks, tiles, ceramics and clay pipes, they refined salt and sugar, bleached linen, boiled soap, brewed beer, distilled spirits and baked bread. All these processes were based on a massive input of thermal energy.

Moreover, the Dutch produced much more than needed for domestic consumption. They became the largest European exporters of many of the above-mentioned industrially manufactured products. On a more modest scale, a similar production boom had happened in Flanders a few centuries earlier, in which an energy-intensive industry appeared in the near total absence of wood reserves. So how did the Dutch and the Flemish achieve this? By mining peat on a truly massive scale.