Solarpunk World Building

[Minuteman37]

Imagin a world in which there were basically no fossil fuels. Maybe they had been mined out by some long gone civilization, maybe they were so rare as to not be an important matter in the nature of the nation. Regardless technology does continue to advance. So I'm proposing a world driven by the sun directly, and not by chemical fuels.

How does this society develop though? Who are the major players on the world stage? What technology is developed to drive this solar Revolution? How different would the world look? At what point does nuclear energy or some other power source overtake solar?

[tanksoldier]

Chemical fuels and fossil fuels aren’t the same thing.

Alcohol might take the place of some petroleum fuels.

...but a world where NO petroleum products exist also won’t have lots of other things like plastic. That’s an even bigger impact than the fuels, IMO.

[Stormcrow]

Why solar, particularly? Wind, water, animal power, and alternative fuels like wood are easier to harness.

Assuming a society dominated by solar power, you probably use it to generate electricity by boiling water and catching the steam in turbines. Focusing lenses are probably very important. The actual use of energy probably isn't all that different from what we do in reality, though it's probably a lot cleaner, and it probably doesn't yield as much energy as burning fossil fuels. Once you can develop solar cells, however, all that changes and it's just like today's solar power.

If you could really create a solar-dominated society that never used fossil fuels, I don't think you'd move to nuclear unless you could demonstrate significant benefits over solar. Such a society might look at nuclear waste and be appalled... or they might look at nuclear waste as just this one little time our energy consumption causes a problem.

The global energy market wouldn't depend so much on the strategic locations of oil fields. Areas with less cloud cover would be the best energy producers.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Why solar, particularly? Wind, water, animal power, and alternative fuels like wood are easier to harness.

All of those probably had to be harnessed before they got to solar. You almost certainly need electricity before solar so some other energy source to generate the electricty for the first gneration of "modern" technology.

Solar is also not very good for independant vehicles like ships. You need a source to power those. A world that never got apst sailing ships isn't all that likely to go solar in a big way.

I also don't think there'd be much "punk" in "solarpunk". Solar needs large scale integration of electicity generation and distribution. That would tend to produce large and stable nation-states (and those can be unfriendly to adventuring).

All in all this looks quite dificult to pull off to me.

[whswhs]

The beginnings of the Industrial Revolution were powered, indirectly, by solar energy: Their prime movers were windmills (air currents are mainly driven by solar heating of the atmosphere) and water mills (rainfalls comes about because of solar evaporation of the oceans). Both technologies are easier to attain than solar mirrors heating steam engines, and far easier than photovoltaic cells. I'm not sure you could do the necessary materials processing to get efficient photovoltaics without the energy intensity of fossil fuels.

[PTTG]

In the broadest sense, all energy is solar (except for geothermal...). Even fossil fuels were created by photosynthesis.

The alchohol-powered era might be like our industrial era, with the exception that switchgrass agriculture was critical. Wealthy landowners probably own vast plantations and distilleries of the stuff.

Since the growth of industry was tied to agriculture, the industrial era was likely different, though exactly how calls for a proper expert in the era.

The development of photovoltaics starts in the mid-1800s, and solar boilers for electricity are effectively simultaneous with any other steam generator, so without the fossil shortcut, they can start pretty early.

Throw in pumped hydroelectric and/or flywheel storage and you could have early 1900s solarpunk if you like. By the present day it starts to look like Ecotopia or that sort of book.

[AlexanderHowl]

At the very least, you get a slower technological progression and a lower population density without fossil fuels. In our own case, I doubt we would have gotten much beyond TL5 and a population of one billion without fossil fuels. In addition, I am not sure if there would have been sufficient demand for solar energy without a larger population to drive it.

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

At the very least, you get a slower technological progression and a lower population density without fossil fuels. In our own case, I doubt we would have gotten much beyond TL5 and a population of one billion without fossil fuels. In addition, I am not sure if there would have been sufficient demand for solar energy without a larger population to drive it.

I think to a certain extent that's an exaggeration. The regions that had the greatest industrialization first weren't those that had exploitable fossil fuels, but rather wherever you had wealth concentration and dense populations well before industrialization began.

[Toptomcat]

Chemistry is going to be a lot different without the petrochemical by-products of a fossil fuel industry. Not just no plastics, but explosives, fertilizers, lubricants, and medicine are likely to be radically different.

Also, what was different ecologically and geologically to prevent the formation of fossil fuels in the first place? That’s likely to have drastic downstream effects.

[Minuteman37]

Originally Posted by Toptomcat

Chemistry is going to be a lot different without the petrochemical by-products of a fossil fuel industry. Not just no plastics, but explosives, fertilizers, lubricants, and medicine are likely to be radically different.

Also, what was different ecologically and geologically to prevent the formation of fossil fuels in the first place? That’s likely to have drastic downstream effects.

I'm just going to say aliens came to earth a couple thousand years ago and took all the easy to get to deposits