no doubt in my mind Rockefeller fucked this guy up
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Capitalism murdered the planet
Yes. One dude doesn't have that much impact.
The technology wasn't a secret. Neither was wind or hydro power. But there was a significant gulf in the cost/return on solar relative to fossil fuels.
Also should be noted that early electric energy production/distribution wasn't the cleanest. Lead batteries, for instance, were as nasty to produce as they were to dispose of. DC current limited distribution to very local hubs. But the real crux was that the electric power Cove produced simply wasn't on the scale of what industrial coal could generate.
The potential energy of chemical combustion is simply more potent than what we can manage electrically. When it isn't - as is the case with large scale hydro generated through damming rivers or enormous surpluses generated through nuclear energy - we routinely capitalize on it. So the theory that every entrepreneur in the intervening 40 years would have simply abandoned a more productive mode of capital due to some infighting between early 1920s industrialists...
As a counterpoint, I would direct you towards the current state of the energy market in Texas. Right now, both solar and wind power generation are growth industries. Despite a significantly larger, more aggressive, and more politically connected O&G industry, some of the most lucrative projects in the state continue to be wind farms along the Gulf Coast and solar plants out West. This is almost entirely thanks to (1) dirt cheap imports of advanced solar technology from China and (2) significant advances is turbine construction combined with a cratering in the cost of raw materials for construction.
Even then, the biggest struggle that solar/wind producers face is distribution. Even with HVAC lines (which remain a future grid project we still haven't invested in) and enormous ROI predicated on high price of electricity around industrial centers, getting energy from point A to point B is the biggest complication in the field. As a result, one of the work-arounds proposed has been finding ways to re-carbonize electricity by using it to perform chemical reactions as a means of storage. Water splitting, hydrogen fuel cells, and gas liquification are all techniques for compressing the energy generated by solar/wind into a more easily transmittable format. More exotic techniques even involve growing algae and camelina that can be reprocessed into traditional carbon fuels.