Asserting fossil fuels are crap betrays you as an ideologue, rather than someone who is solution-oriented.
Fossil fuels have amazing energy density, fantastic refueling characteristics, and a highly developed production and delivery infrastructure. Electricity only has the last one, and even then you have to take marks off for lack of widespread DC in most places on Earth where you can fill a Jerry can with 93 octane.
I know that I can only afford to drive an EV because of a stack of dependencies that work out Just So for myself. I would love for the world to move en masse away from fossil fuels and hydrocarbons in general, but that’s not gonna happen by telling the people who deploy these systems in the real world that the energy source their entire systems are built around is inferior and unnecessary.
This particular author isn't an environmentalist as much as a low tech enthusiast.
Hence, solar and wind power generating electricity, which are clean and green technologies but are not "low tech" do not fit his particular niche interest.
Though the article was from 2018. I think he may have evolved slightly as solar PV begins to feel more like a bit of lumber or a steel girder or anything else you can pick up at a hardware store and so passes his somewhat fuzzy and arbitrary definition of low tech.
They do, because "greens" being anti-nuclear isn't just a fossil fuel talking point. We could have had widely deployed fission power by now, but politicing against it, in which greens were complicit in, managed to stall that out. While it was stalled out, perfect being the enemy of the good, guess which coal and oil plants ran in the meantime‽
I read the whole article figuring that the question in the title would be answered. Like you enjoyed the history but was frustrated by the fact that the question was never addressed.
Grid congestion in The Netherlands is highly localized: the last-mile wiring is at its limits, but higher up there is plenty of capacity. Furthermore, the congestion is time- and condition-dependent: people living in a home want 24/7 access to power, and want it to be reliable.
Some temporary dredging barge getting a high-voltage hookup, which is only running during sunlight hours, and whose operations can be vetoed by the grid operator at very little notice? Not a problem.
I think that's because we've made it politically difficult to build transmission. In the United States, you have to get approval from every jurisdiction and landowner along the route, so valuable transmission lines are politically impossible to build. (See: SOO Green, Grain Belt Express, BECI, other planned lines).
Oil and gas pipelines are centrally approved by FERC, so there is no such difficulty. It doesn't have to be so difficult to build transmission, and it would unlock a lot of wind and solar development.
Whenever wires don't make sense, as is the case for aircraft, synthetic liquid fuels can make sense. In a world where the inputs are free, the inefficiency of the process is not relevant.
Power-to-Liquids (PtL) have air as inputs, but that doesn't make them free. There's a high capex requirement to create the processing plants, and then the energy required to run them isn't free either.
>then the energy required to run them isn't free either
i think his point was that if you are in a remote location with solar and or wind power, the power is free because you can't do anything else with it (without transmission lines)
Many enviromentalists want to move past the enshitified present, and get a place where responsibly utilised technologys can be maintained ,repaired and modified.
Doing repair and maintenance to a wide variety of equipment from many different erras, while building new things is part of my life.I am getting most of my energy from solar and renewable sources, but with engines for more energy intensive things like welding and transportation so thinking about ways to reasonably move forward has me very interested in electric battery cars,trucks,boats,airplanes,tractors and the rest, like megga massive earth moving equipment or say a dredge, which is where we agree, but it has to be a thing that is intuitive to operate and fix, reliable, and reasonably safe, but not priced so high that only capital can own it, this last bit is the part that makes the past atractive, as it is a place where if nothing else, people had agency as the default.VS the nagging nanny nightmare of enshitification and bieng institutionalised in there own skin.
> Why do many environmental activists seem to want to go back to a shitty past rather than move forward to bright future.
So do care about the environment but many "green" activists do not care at all for the environment: for those it's just another version of communism. They want to crush the notion of the individual: they cannot understand the notion of a free, happy, individual.
They're rather have unhappy people united in communism, living miserably like under the USSR, than having a more advanced, richer, country if more advanced and richer means people are free.
Many don't care a yota about the environment: it's just an excuse to try to remove freedom from others.
"People from minority groups are relatively more often suspected of crimes that are more likely to end in a prison sentence. There is also a higher average number of charges against people from minority groups. On the socio-economic scale, people with an immigration background are more likely to be in vulnerable positions with lower education levels.
"The origin of a suspect influences the outcomes of the criminal proceedings against them. 'This may indicate conscious or unconscious discrimination, which goes against the principle of the rule of law, in which everyone has an equal chance of fair treatment,' the researchers said."
It seems like someone with an immigration background should have to go through an on-boarding period where a new arrival takes part in community service and is immersed with civic-minded people and good citizens rather than just heading straight for the slums to fend for themselves and live among the sorts of people who will be a bad influence on them.
Why should you adjust for socio-economic factors though? Migrants coming to a new country where they score systematically worse on some kind of socio-economic metric, and then systematically committing more crime than the indigenous population, is bad for the indigenous population regardless.
Somebody would have to drive the buses and wait the tables. You're making it appear as if immigrants appeared out of thin air to occupy a social position. But the receiving country needs them, because their population is too old, too lazy, too greedy, or all three.
It's very useful to have a disenfranchised underclass of immigrants to keep your own working class in check. Bonus points if you convince the latter that the source of all evil is the former.
that study was specifically "asylum seekers" which is not migrants taken as a whole. isn't the migrant population substantially higher than the asylum population?
> those ships would require enormous chemical batteries
In many cases they can't be all that far from land, could one set up a way to run wires?
I also wonder about the possibility for some kind of permanent installation in select places, where small amounts of sediment are continually removed (as opposed to large amounts of sediment occasionally removed). Being permanent means you can hook it up to the grid.
For canals, I'd say yes. I mean related, before steam / fossil / etc we'd have a "trekschuit", which was a canal boat pulled by people and / or animals that walked on a path alongside the canals. Wired propulsion, if you will. I can see a system similar to trains/trams but for ships would work.
The Netherlands uses the largest and most powerful dredging ship in the world, The Queen of the Netherlands. Each of the dredging pumps are 8,000 horsepower (6 MW) and there are two of them. Even the short-range ship-to-shore connections used by container ships are in the 2 MW range. Running "wires" would be ambitious.
cables can get pretty big, you could run maybe 75-90MW through a 66kV 1200mm2 Cu offshore wind array cable, maybe 500MW through a 275kV 2000mm2 cu export cable and 1.3GW through a 320kV hvdc bipole set of cables (2GW through 525kv HVDC!) - you would just have the minor inconvenience of convertors and or substations to deal with at either end ;)
It’s definitely possible, I don’t have an in depth knowledge of ships connected to shore power with cables, but if the distance isn’t too great, it seems possible.
Raising voltage lowers the ampacity to allow for smaller conductors.
6MW at 7200V is only ~500A, 6MW at 13.8kV is only 250A.
There are massive electric powered hydraulic mining machines that operate connected to power cables.
We already have 25kV for rail electrification which move 6MW all over the place, surely at boat speeds making some strange double-pantograph system for shipping could be strung up alongside most of the canals, maybe electric tugs could be used as well as normal shipping?
> surely at boat speeds making some strange double-pantograph system for shipping could be strung up alongside most of the canals, maybe electric tugs could be used as well as normal shipping?
I like it, very similar to how mules used to pull barges thru canals except with electrical cables and a rail pantograph running on distribution lines next to the canal instead of mules and ropes.
I think, crucially, we cannot do so without damaging the environment even without fossil fuels. In time, presumably environmental concerns will result in sufficient acceleration of depolderization until the Netherlands no longer has such a large environmental damage footprint. Fortunately, they have made strides on this[0] but in time they will hopefully mitigate the terrible damage they have done here.
I wanna plug Fervo energy, as advanced geothermal, where they've got a plant in the US where it's up and running. They tunnel into the Earth and use that to heat up water, and use that temperature differential to generate electricity. Expertise in drilling oil wells can be translated into drilling geothermal pipes instead!
You do know you can burn stuff that is not dug up from the ground right? From ethanol to sun flower and coconut oil. You can pretty much just pour them in a gas tank and the engine will just work.
Sure you can burn them, doesn't mean you're accomplishing anything from a thermodynamic point of view.
Metric to look at is EROI - Energy Return on Investment. How much energy do you put into growing these crops to get a unit of energy out?
Corn ethanol in the US is stupid because it's a 1.6:1 return at best, often a 1:1. To get a unit of energy out of corn ethanol, you need to put almost a unit in. And that's economic inputs, we know the sunshine is free. Sugarcane is a bit better, but you can only grow it in the tropics.
For reference, solar tends to be something like 4:1 - 10:1, wind is 10:1 +/- onshore or offshore, fracked oil tends to be down around 5:1-8:1, and a saudi well is (or at least used to be) 40:1.
Once you have a sustainable process, these last holdout areas like dredging (where you can't use batteries or wires) can have relatively terrible EROI as long as they're a small minority of the economy. All aviation and shipping combined is about 6% of final energy, and with major redesigns for shipping it could be as low as 4%. So you'd trade a much better EROI for 96% of the economy for a terrible one that only affects 4%.
You are looking it from the wrong angle the way I see it.
First there are significant quantities of oils grown used in cooking and discarded, in an often environmentally damaging way.
Reclaiming and burning these adds value to a waste product.
What is the EROI on batteries surely under 1.
These oils can provide energy storage and transmission in applications where electricity is ill suited, jet engines (coconut oil is especially suitable for this) and shipping come to mind.
EROI is also why we really need to get off of fossil fuels long before we actually literally run out (i.e. now would be great)
As a resource reaches depletion, there are two forces acting on EROI: 1) the increased cost of each unit of energy input, and 2) the reduced yield from that energy input.
The EROI curve bends negative faster than you think by looking at history.
All too often those have bad environmental impacts of their own. Coconut oil ends up being grown in plantains that require clear cutting natural forests. The agricultural process to plant, grow and harvest sunflowers produces significant CO2 just as it does for growing corn for ethanol.
The savings in CO2 emissions for the likes of rapeseed, sunflower etc per MJ of energy is only around 50% compared to diesel. You have to release a lot of CO2 to grow these crops intensively. And that’s before you even consider where the land for these crops come from, potentially chopping down CO2 absorbing rainforests in many sorts of the world.
Biofuel from Used Cooking Oil is worthy considering for sure, but the quantities possible are tiny compared to the petrol/diesel we use.
Electricity generated from wind and solar with some wires to the dredge would be way easier than dredging by hand.
Why do many environmental activists seem to want to go back to a shitty past rather than move forward to bright future.
The historical aspects of this article are a good read though. Very interesting technology.
> Why do many environmental activists seem to want to go back to a shitty past rather than move forward to bright future.
They don't. That's fossil fuel propoganda that you've fallen for and are now spreading.
In reality fossil fuel is crap and we don't need it.
Asserting fossil fuels are crap betrays you as an ideologue, rather than someone who is solution-oriented.
Fossil fuels have amazing energy density, fantastic refueling characteristics, and a highly developed production and delivery infrastructure. Electricity only has the last one, and even then you have to take marks off for lack of widespread DC in most places on Earth where you can fill a Jerry can with 93 octane.
I know that I can only afford to drive an EV because of a stack of dependencies that work out Just So for myself. I would love for the world to move en masse away from fossil fuels and hydrocarbons in general, but that’s not gonna happen by telling the people who deploy these systems in the real world that the energy source their entire systems are built around is inferior and unnecessary.
> In reality fossil fuel is crap and we don't need it.
I agree, which is why I was advocating for clean electricity to do the dredging.
The end of this article advocates for going back hand labor, which is what I was pushing back on as an unpractical return to a shitty past.
This particular author isn't an environmentalist as much as a low tech enthusiast.
Hence, solar and wind power generating electricity, which are clean and green technologies but are not "low tech" do not fit his particular niche interest.
Though the article was from 2018. I think he may have evolved slightly as solar PV begins to feel more like a bit of lumber or a steel girder or anything else you can pick up at a hardware store and so passes his somewhat fuzzy and arbitrary definition of low tech.
I would love to live in a world where I don’t need fossil fuels.
They do, because "greens" being anti-nuclear isn't just a fossil fuel talking point. We could have had widely deployed fission power by now, but politicing against it, in which greens were complicit in, managed to stall that out. While it was stalled out, perfect being the enemy of the good, guess which coal and oil plants ran in the meantime‽
I read the whole article figuring that the question in the title would be answered. Like you enjoyed the history but was frustrated by the fact that the question was never addressed.
Well, for a techno-utopian perspective, a page called "Low Tech Magazine" might not be the right place to search. :)
Besides, the page linked is actually powered entirely by solar panels, although intentionally not battery backed in this instance.
>some wires.
Id look into that statement some more if I were you: There’s much difficulty building houses and starting industry because the net is congested.
As always: if it’s as easy as a random commenter suggests, it’s probably not that easy.
Grid congestion in The Netherlands is highly localized: the last-mile wiring is at its limits, but higher up there is plenty of capacity. Furthermore, the congestion is time- and condition-dependent: people living in a home want 24/7 access to power, and want it to be reliable.
Some temporary dredging barge getting a high-voltage hookup, which is only running during sunlight hours, and whose operations can be vetoed by the grid operator at very little notice? Not a problem.
I think that's because we've made it politically difficult to build transmission. In the United States, you have to get approval from every jurisdiction and landowner along the route, so valuable transmission lines are politically impossible to build. (See: SOO Green, Grain Belt Express, BECI, other planned lines).
Oil and gas pipelines are centrally approved by FERC, so there is no such difficulty. It doesn't have to be so difficult to build transmission, and it would unlock a lot of wind and solar development.
Whenever wires don't make sense, as is the case for aircraft, synthetic liquid fuels can make sense. In a world where the inputs are free, the inefficiency of the process is not relevant.
Power-to-Liquids (PtL) have air as inputs, but that doesn't make them free. There's a high capex requirement to create the processing plants, and then the energy required to run them isn't free either.
>then the energy required to run them isn't free either
i think his point was that if you are in a remote location with solar and or wind power, the power is free because you can't do anything else with it (without transmission lines)
Many enviromentalists want to move past the enshitified present, and get a place where responsibly utilised technologys can be maintained ,repaired and modified. Doing repair and maintenance to a wide variety of equipment from many different erras, while building new things is part of my life.I am getting most of my energy from solar and renewable sources, but with engines for more energy intensive things like welding and transportation so thinking about ways to reasonably move forward has me very interested in electric battery cars,trucks,boats,airplanes,tractors and the rest, like megga massive earth moving equipment or say a dredge, which is where we agree, but it has to be a thing that is intuitive to operate and fix, reliable, and reasonably safe, but not priced so high that only capital can own it, this last bit is the part that makes the past atractive, as it is a place where if nothing else, people had agency as the default.VS the nagging nanny nightmare of enshitification and bieng institutionalised in there own skin.
> Why do many environmental activists seem to want to go back to a shitty past rather than move forward to bright future.
So do care about the environment but many "green" activists do not care at all for the environment: for those it's just another version of communism. They want to crush the notion of the individual: they cannot understand the notion of a free, happy, individual.
They're rather have unhappy people united in communism, living miserably like under the USSR, than having a more advanced, richer, country if more advanced and richer means people are free.
Many don't care a yota about the environment: it's just an excuse to try to remove freedom from others.
I kinda like the idea of using prison labour for environmentally friendly dredging.
But The Netherlands abolish prison slave labour in 2021 so that is no longer possible.
https://nltimes.nl/2025/06/20/ethnicity-definitely-plays-rol...
"People from minority groups are relatively more often suspected of crimes that are more likely to end in a prison sentence. There is also a higher average number of charges against people from minority groups. On the socio-economic scale, people with an immigration background are more likely to be in vulnerable positions with lower education levels.
"The origin of a suspect influences the outcomes of the criminal proceedings against them. 'This may indicate conscious or unconscious discrimination, which goes against the principle of the rule of law, in which everyone has an equal chance of fair treatment,' the researchers said."
It seems like someone with an immigration background should have to go through an on-boarding period where a new arrival takes part in community service and is immersed with civic-minded people and good citizens rather than just heading straight for the slums to fend for themselves and live among the sorts of people who will be a bad influence on them.
How would that lower the rate at which immigrants are suspected of crimes?
If you adjust for socio-economic factors then migrants are just as criminal as the rest of the population.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2621324-percentage-asielmigranten-ver...
Why should you adjust for socio-economic factors though? Migrants coming to a new country where they score systematically worse on some kind of socio-economic metric, and then systematically committing more crime than the indigenous population, is bad for the indigenous population regardless.
Somebody would have to drive the buses and wait the tables. You're making it appear as if immigrants appeared out of thin air to occupy a social position. But the receiving country needs them, because their population is too old, too lazy, too greedy, or all three.
It's very useful to have a disenfranchised underclass of immigrants to keep your own working class in check. Bonus points if you convince the latter that the source of all evil is the former.
101 capitalism, and it has worked with you.
that study was specifically "asylum seekers" which is not migrants taken as a whole. isn't the migrant population substantially higher than the asylum population?
oh look a greenbrown
> those ships would require enormous chemical batteries
In many cases they can't be all that far from land, could one set up a way to run wires?
I also wonder about the possibility for some kind of permanent installation in select places, where small amounts of sediment are continually removed (as opposed to large amounts of sediment occasionally removed). Being permanent means you can hook it up to the grid.
For canals, I'd say yes. I mean related, before steam / fossil / etc we'd have a "trekschuit", which was a canal boat pulled by people and / or animals that walked on a path alongside the canals. Wired propulsion, if you will. I can see a system similar to trains/trams but for ships would work.
The Netherlands uses the largest and most powerful dredging ship in the world, The Queen of the Netherlands. Each of the dredging pumps are 8,000 horsepower (6 MW) and there are two of them. Even the short-range ship-to-shore connections used by container ships are in the 2 MW range. Running "wires" would be ambitious.
Those giant bucket wheel excavators are also electrically powered, by cables. And they use up to 16 MW, so I wouldn't call it completely unrealistic.
Of course running them over some dirt is easier than through possibly moving water, but still.
cables can get pretty big, you could run maybe 75-90MW through a 66kV 1200mm2 Cu offshore wind array cable, maybe 500MW through a 275kV 2000mm2 cu export cable and 1.3GW through a 320kV hvdc bipole set of cables (2GW through 525kv HVDC!) - you would just have the minor inconvenience of convertors and or substations to deal with at either end ;)
> Running "wires" would be ambitious.
It’s definitely possible, I don’t have an in depth knowledge of ships connected to shore power with cables, but if the distance isn’t too great, it seems possible.
Raising voltage lowers the ampacity to allow for smaller conductors.
6MW at 7200V is only ~500A, 6MW at 13.8kV is only 250A.
There are massive electric powered hydraulic mining machines that operate connected to power cables.
We already have 25kV for rail electrification which move 6MW all over the place, surely at boat speeds making some strange double-pantograph system for shipping could be strung up alongside most of the canals, maybe electric tugs could be used as well as normal shipping?
High speed trains can be over 16MW on 25kV AC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_374 (16MW)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_Series_Shinkansen (18MW)
> surely at boat speeds making some strange double-pantograph system for shipping could be strung up alongside most of the canals, maybe electric tugs could be used as well as normal shipping?
I like it, very similar to how mules used to pull barges thru canals except with electrical cables and a rail pantograph running on distribution lines next to the canal instead of mules and ropes.
I think, crucially, we cannot do so without damaging the environment even without fossil fuels. In time, presumably environmental concerns will result in sufficient acceleration of depolderization until the Netherlands no longer has such a large environmental damage footprint. Fortunately, they have made strides on this[0] but in time they will hopefully mitigate the terrible damage they have done here.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder
Reminded me of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-1Af96gYVI
"The insane plan to dam the North Sea."
I wanna plug Fervo energy, as advanced geothermal, where they've got a plant in the US where it's up and running. They tunnel into the Earth and use that to heat up water, and use that temperature differential to generate electricity. Expertise in drilling oil wells can be translated into drilling geothermal pipes instead!
You do know you can burn stuff that is not dug up from the ground right? From ethanol to sun flower and coconut oil. You can pretty much just pour them in a gas tank and the engine will just work.
Sure you can burn them, doesn't mean you're accomplishing anything from a thermodynamic point of view.
Metric to look at is EROI - Energy Return on Investment. How much energy do you put into growing these crops to get a unit of energy out?
Corn ethanol in the US is stupid because it's a 1.6:1 return at best, often a 1:1. To get a unit of energy out of corn ethanol, you need to put almost a unit in. And that's economic inputs, we know the sunshine is free. Sugarcane is a bit better, but you can only grow it in the tropics.
For reference, solar tends to be something like 4:1 - 10:1, wind is 10:1 +/- onshore or offshore, fracked oil tends to be down around 5:1-8:1, and a saudi well is (or at least used to be) 40:1.
Once you have a sustainable process, these last holdout areas like dredging (where you can't use batteries or wires) can have relatively terrible EROI as long as they're a small minority of the economy. All aviation and shipping combined is about 6% of final energy, and with major redesigns for shipping it could be as low as 4%. So you'd trade a much better EROI for 96% of the economy for a terrible one that only affects 4%.
You are looking it from the wrong angle the way I see it.
First there are significant quantities of oils grown used in cooking and discarded, in an often environmentally damaging way.
Reclaiming and burning these adds value to a waste product.
What is the EROI on batteries surely under 1.
These oils can provide energy storage and transmission in applications where electricity is ill suited, jet engines (coconut oil is especially suitable for this) and shipping come to mind.
EROI is also why we really need to get off of fossil fuels long before we actually literally run out (i.e. now would be great)
As a resource reaches depletion, there are two forces acting on EROI: 1) the increased cost of each unit of energy input, and 2) the reduced yield from that energy input.
The EROI curve bends negative faster than you think by looking at history.
> Sugarcane is a bit better, but you can only grow it in the tropics.
Not for long! Or rather, the range of the tropics are moving, so that won't be the thing holding us back if that's the route we wanna take.
All too often those have bad environmental impacts of their own. Coconut oil ends up being grown in plantains that require clear cutting natural forests. The agricultural process to plant, grow and harvest sunflowers produces significant CO2 just as it does for growing corn for ethanol.
I don't think anyone grows extra coconuts for fuel. It's processed from the waste after the more profitable parts are extracted.
Good point, liquid and gas fuels will continue to be important into the future where energy density is needed, fuel cells could be a good option also.
Depending on the engine, perhaps. But this still releases CO2. This is not about supply limitations.
These are carbon neutral as they remove atmospheric CO2 when the plant matter is grown
The savings in CO2 emissions for the likes of rapeseed, sunflower etc per MJ of energy is only around 50% compared to diesel. You have to release a lot of CO2 to grow these crops intensively. And that’s before you even consider where the land for these crops come from, potentially chopping down CO2 absorbing rainforests in many sorts of the world.
Biofuel from Used Cooking Oil is worthy considering for sure, but the quantities possible are tiny compared to the petrol/diesel we use.