One Example of Working Energy Infrastructure

Let’s take a step backwards and re-consider the point that every civilization has energy infrastructure. Again, and for context, we note that in a subsistence agrarian society, the energy infrastructure is really the agricultural and food storage infrastructure. And in that context, let’s consider the traditional practice of smoking. (You can do this drill on any energy infrastructure project, ancient or modern, or even hypothetical/fictional).

Smoking involves exposing food to smoke from burning wood to remove moisture and thus prevent bacterial growth and thus store/preserve the food. Smoking was typically done in specialized structures known as smokehouses, that is, small, enclosed buildings designed to contain smoke and heat from burning wood. Food to be smoked would be hung from hooks or racks inside the smokehouse, to be exposed to the smoke for several hours or even days.

Of course, we shouldn’t forget that the meat brought to the smokehouse to be processed had to be hunted, fished, or raised, and then killed and transported. And hunters, fishermen and livestock all need to be continually fed, watered and sheltered.

In the most basic terms, the smokehouse is a form of a processing plant or refinery, where work is performed on an energy commodity to allow it to move into further distribution and storage and eventual use.

And here’s where it gets interesting: the plant or refinery needs its own feedstock (wood to burn), which is backed by its own generation and distribution system (chopping down the trees, delivering the wood). That distribution system depends on roads (which must be built), or rivers (which must be navigated on barges which must be built….from wood).

We should also note that the design of the smokehouse didn’t just spring up out of nowhere one morning. People had to think through how it would function, and how to make it work. They experimented, designed and re-designed. This process would undoubtedly have been accompanied by many failures. Sadly, at some point, this whole process of designing a smokehouse undoubtedly included injury and probably death. Wood, fire and smoke are inherently dangerous.

But at some point, the whole complex system centered around the smokehouse began to function. This is the same process which must be replicated throughout the entirety of that civilization’s energy infrastructure.

So energy infrastructure is an endless loop of interrelated and complex processes. Even something that seems from our perspective to be fairly primitive (smoking meat in order to store calories so we can survive) is actually quite sophisticated and complex.

But it is also recognizable because every energy infrastructure system contends with the same basic concepts of generation/production, transportation/distribution, processing/refining, and storage.

One of the difficult problems of bringing energy to the world today is that in the high tech, modern, western world, we lapse into a lack of awareness of the reality that making a big change in one aspect of our energy infrastructure affects the entirety. The difficult questions associated with continually upgrading and innovating and changing energy generation will massively impact distribution and storage. You can’t do one without affecting everything else.