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Electricity Consumption
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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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It would be interesting (if the data was available) to see the energy consumption in Europe at that time: windmills, horses drawing carts, cooking fires, etc.
Visited a traditional water-powered flour mill recently. Very cool, beautiful building, and the end product makes really delicious bread and pasta. Wholemeal, not too fine, nothing in it but grain. Perfection.
From the water flow, drop and wheel turning rate, I made the maximum possible power as about 5 kW. Probably optimistic to think you'd get a quarter of that in practice. Still, that's a huge amount compared to what a person can produce, and it's 'on tap' 24 hours a day. That kind of thing does explain why, in the days before electrification, that having 'the right landscape' made some areas really wealthy and some others not. Exploitable renewable energy, what a concept.
So yeah, your proposed map would be really interesting. The Romans burned down whole forests to make steel - you simply couldn't refine it in a place without. It would be fascinating to see the map of "power resources" and the resulting industries, even if it would be very hypothetical.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking about. I think in the modern world we underestimate how much "power" was being used on a daily basis before the industrial revolution. The main thing the industrial revolution gave the world is the potential to have constant, predictable power in a location that was convenient.
Windmills and water mills could be pretty powerful. But, as you said, location was everything. And, in the case of wind, it wasn't always predictable. And in map form, it would be really cool to know where that power was being generated, and what effect that might have had on another kind of power: political power.
There is a great book and journal article from Barnabas Calder which links architecture to available energy. It covers the available energy since prehistoric times in some detail.
Here is a blog article from them: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/keynote/form-follows-fuel-energy-hungry-architecture