| Somewhat more substantively, so were William Stanley Jevons, in The Coal Question (1857),[1] and earlier by John Williams, a mineral surveyor, in Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom (1789).[2] Thing is that since the time of Jevons, the only energy sources added to our knowledge are nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and the rather improbable prospect of antiatter annihilation (an energy carrier rather than energy source). Solar PV has emerged as an energy conversion technology, first discovered as the photoelectric effect in the late 19th century and scientific theory identified by Einstein. We've seen considerable technical improvements to technologies known since the 1950s, but also clear limitations (fission and fusion most especially, but also maximal efficiencies of PV and battery storage). Efficiencies have improved, toward the bound of theoretical limits, and costs fallen. But we're still largely living in the world of 1857 in terms of the options available to us. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Jevons: https://archive.org/details/TheCoalQuestion 2. Referenced by Jevons. Available at https://archive.org/details/naturalhistorym00millgoog |