If the first solar entrepreneur hadn't been kidnapped, would fossil fuels have dominated the 20th century?

PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee to Technology@lemmy.world – 216 points – If the first solar entrepreneur hadn't been kidnapped, would fossil fuels have dominated the 20th century?
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The first commercial PV solar product was nah just in 1909.

See story above, and original article in Modern Electrics magazine in 1909:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015051407073

EDIT

Since people didn't read past the headline, the article is about a startup company in 1905 that developed a commercial electrical solar panel by 1909 and was worth 160 million in today's money.

In 1909, the inventor of the solar panel was kidnapped and ordered by his kidnappers to destroy all information about this solar panel. He was eventually released, although he did not destroy the solar panel or his documentation, he did shut down his company.

So this is a pretty fascinating development considering that at this time period we actually did have early production electric cars that were manufactured in larger quantities than gas vehicles, and now we learn that solar panels were commercially available, at least for a short time.

And the solar panels could generate a fair amount of electricity:

500 volts per 10 square ft, and a smaller demonstration panel that was 3 ft x 4 ft could generate 60 watts of power (10 volts @6 amps).

Additionally, the panels were designed to charge a battery backup system.

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I did not read any of your linked articles, but the answer is yes, fossil fuels most certainly would have dominated the 20th century because they are:

  • Cheap
  • Stable, you don’t have to depend on the sun shining
  • Nobody really cared about climate change back then, they were estimating a few centuries and humans… aren’t that forward thinking

Edit: I was beaten by another commentator lol

That being said, free electricity is free electricity. There are so many use cases for distributed small power systems, particularly in rural areas. I would bet that early solar could have found widespread use while yes, fossil fuels would still have dominated.

It's not free though, solar panels back then would be prohibitively expensive for the number required to get any amount of useful power. I suspect they weren't all that durable or weatherproof either, so that's even more cost in periodic replacement.

Meanwhile your neighbour is burning this black stuff that's almost as cheap as dirt and getting huge amounts of energy out of it.

Coal required someone to dig the mine, build the railroad and powerplant, not to mention build the electricity infrastructure. That was a huge expense and made a lot of people rich.

We do t have a cost information to judge these by, but the infrastructure costs were certainly far lower for solar panels.

I fully agree. In cities and places with a grid, fossil fuels will absolutely dominate, while rural grids/independent homeowners could use solar. However, I do think the cost of acquiring such panels could be prohibitively expensive for some rural homeowners.