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23 - Technological Black Boxing versus Ecological Reparation: From Encased-Industrial to Open-Renewable Wind Energy
- Edited by Dimitris Papadopoulos, University of Nottingham, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, University of Warwick, Maddalena Tacchetti, University of Nottingham
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- Book:
- Ecological Reparation
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 28 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 December 2023, pp 362-376
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Summary
Retrieving the historical contrast between open and closed wind energy structures
Our present perception of wind energy technology is dominated by the version of wind turbines that we find in ‘wind farms’ (‘wind parks’), which is associated with landscape degradation and local resistance. Locals don’t want these turbines installed in their back yard, we don’t ever see them posing happily in front of them. Even their most ardent supporters, who promote them as an unavoidable necessity in the face of the global environmental crisis, agree that there is nothing aesthetically appealing about these wind turbines. They just charge the local opponents of these wind turbines with suffering from the ‘not in my back yard’ syndrome. The reference to such a syndrome is by itself an acknowledgement of the negative aesthetic impact of these wind turbines. The ‘energy landscapes’ produced by the installation of wind farm turbines are certainly not attractive. In fact, if the criterion for the evaluation of the merits of wind energy turbines is their impact on the landscape, wind farm turbines score no better than fossil fuel energy generation plants (Pasqualetti and Stremke, 2018).
There were, however, in the past versions of wind energy technology that people were looking forward to be in a picture with. Going through the album of pictures that T. Lindsay Baker collected in American Windmills: An Album of Historic Photographs leaves no doubt about it (Baker, 2012). The owners of the kind of wind energy technology that we find in this album, together with a crowd formed by their relatives and friends, posed happily in front of it on all important occasions: from a baptism ceremony that was taking place at a water tank filled through the use of a wind pump to a wedding ceremony that was bringing together a comparable crowd, which also posed in front of the wind pump and the farm house that it was right next to (or just behind of). As we see in the picture that Baker chose for the cover of his book, people could not simply pose in front of this wind energy technology; they could actually pose in it (and on it). We will here refer to this past farm wind energy technology as ‘open’, while we will argue that the wind farm energy technology of present day is ‘closed’.
Perpetually Laborious: Computing Electric Power Transmission Before The Electronic Computer
- Aristotle Tympas
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- Journal:
- International Review of Social History / Volume 48 / Issue S11 / December 2003
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 24 October 2003, pp. 73-95
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Placing Thomas Edison at the beginning of a history on electric power transmission hardly needs justification. Thomas Edison's abundant supply of pictures of himself as an inventive genius – and America's pressing demand for a myth of an ingenious inventor – combined to bestow a “Eureka” moment upon Edison's pioneering Pearl Street (New York) Station electric lighting network. But the history of the laborious computations that took place at Menlo Park and the division-of-computing labor of which Edison took advantage suggests a different view of inventive genius. The story of the computational pyramid formed by the labors of Francis R. Upton, Charles L. Clarke, and Samuel D. Mott (1879–1880) can be reconstructed from the existing literature. In his reminiscences from Menlo Park, Edison's employee, Francis Jehl, detailed how Edison thought of constructing a miniaturized network to be used as a computer of the actual network. Knowing that constructing, maintaining, and using the miniature network required a considerable amount of skilled labor, Edison decided to hire an employee for it, Dr Herman Claudius. Edison enthusiastically welcomed Claudius to perform a type of computing work “requiring nerve and super abundance of patience and knowledge”. Jehl remembered that the labor of constructing a miniature network of conductors, “all in proportion, to show Mr Edison what he would have to install in New York City in connection with the Pearl Street Station” was “gigantic”. Following the pattern of the Pearl Street Station electric lighting network, several similar networks were built in the early 1880s. In response, Edison's labor pyramid was enlarged by giving Claudius an assistant, Hermann Lemp, who performed the monotonous task of constructing the new miniature networks, which Edison needed for computation. Inconvenient as it might be for those who assume that technological change is the product of inventive genius, electrification was, from the beginning, laboriously computed; it was not, like Athena, a deity that leapt from a godly head.