{"id":2493,"date":"2010-08-10T05:56:45","date_gmt":"2010-08-10T09:56:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/?p=2493"},"modified":"2017-09-05T17:52:29","modified_gmt":"2017-09-05T21:52:29","slug":"renewable-energy-technologies-are-not-so-new-after-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/renewable-energy-technologies-are-not-so-new-after-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Renewable energy technologies are not so new, after all"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><figure style=\"width: 187px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/quixote.jpg\" width=\"187\" height=\"171\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Via Crystalinks<\/figcaption><\/figure>When Chris Huhne the British secretary of state of energy and climate change wrote in a letter to the Financial Times newspaper that nuclear will not have public subsidy because in contrast to the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153infant industries of renewables\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, it is a mature technology, he attracted the scrutiny of the newspaper\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s history-savvy readers.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nOne reader from Bucks, in England, wrote to say that the first wind turbine for electricity production was built by Prof. James Blyth of Anderson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s College in Glasgow in 1887. He reminded Huhne that that was 45 years before the atom was split in Cambridge in 1932 and 69 years before the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first full-scale nuclear power station was commissioned at Calder Hall in 1956.<\/p>\n<p><!--adsense#300--><\/p>\n<p>Another reader from London wrote to say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153mature\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153infant\u00e2\u20ac\u009d are \u00e2\u20ac\u0153in the eye (or ideology) of the beholder &#8230; The harnessing of wind power predates [nuclear] by several centuries \u00e2\u20ac\u201c witness the travails of Dom Quixote \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it is not just recently that the Spanish have been covering their countryside with windmills.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>The reader also made a comment about hydro. He said that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153electric power has been generated from hydro sources since at least the 19th century. And then of course, when it comes to solar energy, there is the famous \u00e2\u20ac\u0153solar oven\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, built in 1767 by Horace-B\u00c3\u00a9n\u00c3\u00a9dict de Saussure\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n<p>It sounds like Chris Huhne was skipping history lessons as a schoolboy\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n<p><!--adsense--><\/p>\n<h3 class='related_post_title'>Related Posts:<\/h3><ul class='related_post'><li>No Related Posts Found! Go find some...<\/li><\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When Chris Huhne the British secretary of state of energy and climate change wrote in a letter to the Financial Times newspaper that nuclear will not have public subsidy because in contrast to the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153infant industries of renewables\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, it is a mature technology, he attracted the scrutiny of the newspaper\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s history-savvy readers. Related Posts:No Related [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,20,48,33,19],"tags":[447,446,1706,118],"class_list":["post-2493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alternative-energy","category-green-politics","category-nuclear-power","category-solar-power","category-wind-energy","tag-don-quixote","tag-nuclear-power-2","tag-solar-power","tag-wind-power"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9541,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493\/revisions\/9541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}