Renewable

What if the energy that powers your life—your lights, your car, your phone—became impossible to see? In Renewable, science writer Jeremy Shere takes that invisibility and turns it inside out, showing how energy—especially renewable energy—has always been a profoundly human story. Through history, invention, and personal exploration, he reveals how our quest to power modern life has shaped who we are, where we live, and what we expect from technology. The book isn’t just about wind turbines or solar panels; it’s about the people who dreamed them up, the failures that paved their success, and the revolutions—both scientific and social—that led us here.

Shere argues that renewable energy is not a modern fad or a futuristic fantasy—it’s the next chapter in a story that began centuries ago. The core argument: humanity has always depended on renewables, but the rise of fossil fuels made us forget. Now, economic pressure, environmental crisis, and creative innovation are pushing us back to our roots with far more powerful tools. To understand where we’re going, we must look backward—to understand how human imagination has repeatedly tried to replace coal, oil, and gas with something cleaner, cheaper, and more local.

From Past Dependence to Renewable Future

The book opens with a relatable moment: Shere’s car breaks down, forcing him to think not about mechanics but about energy choices. Should he buy a hybrid, an electric, a flex-fuel model? This moment becomes a metaphor for our shared dilemma—each of us is making energy decisions, whether we realize it or not. It’s not about a single purchase; it’s about the way culture and technology shape those choices. Shere contends that what we face now isn’t just an energy problem but a story problem: we’ve forgotten the narrative of innovation that once made renewable energy feel inevitable.

Shere takes readers through history’s major energy experiments: Henry Ford’s early flirtation with ethanol as a cleaner fuel for the Model T; Jimmy Carter’s symbolic installation of White House solar panels; Frank Shuman’s 1913 solar thermal plant in Egypt; and Charles Brush’s 1880s backyard wind turbine. Each episode reveals a recurring pattern—technological promise, economic pushback, social skepticism, and eventual rediscovery. By retracing these stories, Shere insists we see renewables not as new inventions but as rediscoveries.

The Five Powers

Shere organizes the book around five natural forces—Green Gas, Sun, Wind, Earth, and Water—and shows how each one threads through history. Biofuels (“green gas”) begin with Ford’s ethanol experiments and culminate in cellulosic fuels made from miscanthus grass and algae. Solar energy travels from 19th-century mirror machines to Bell Labs’ silicon cells to 21st-century thin-film factories. Wind goes from medieval mills to towering turbines and megafarms. Earth becomes geothermal—heat captured in deep pipes, powering universities. Water transforms into modern hydropower and experimental wave converters off Oregon’s coast. Each element represents both a technological lineage and a philosophical return to balance with nature’s rhythms.

These stories are not just technical—they’re emotional. Shere emphasizes the enthusiasm of inventors like Augustin Mouchot, who built solar engines out of polished mirrors in 19th-century France; and the heartbreak of pioneers like Stephen Salter, whose wave-energy Duck was quietly sabotaged by bureaucracy. By humanizing these figures, Shere shows that our energy evolution has always relied on individuals daring enough to rethink what power means.

Why the Past Matters Now

The point of exploring the past isn’t nostalgia—it’s insight. Shere believes renewable energy struggles because it’s still largely invisible to the public imagination. We flip light switches, fuel cars, and stream videos without seeing the hidden systems that make it possible. Yet that invisibility—what he calls energy’s "magic trick"—also blinds us to its costs: pollution, climate disruption, and finite resources. By making energy visible again, Shere argues, we can make smarter, more humane decisions about our future. Renewable ends with an epilogue reminding readers that although fossil fuels built the modern world, they are temporary visitors in human history. The sun, wind, earth, and water were our first partners—and, inevitably, they will be our last.

Imagine Henry Ford, the world’s car magnate, driving through the back roads of Florida in 1917 searching for sugarcane fields—not for sweetness, but for fuel. In the opening section titled Green Gas, Shere traces how bioenergy, from alcohol to ethanol, has long captured human imagination as a cleaner, renewable alternative to oil. The story begins with Ford and Thomas Edison exploring agricultural fuels and stretches to 21st-century experiments with cellulosic ethanol, algae oil, and beyond.

The Rise and Rejection of Alcohol Fuel

Before gasoline ruled, alcohol was the fuel of choice. In the mid-1800s, whale oil lamps gave way to alcohol-based camphene; by the early 20th century, scientists praised ethanol for its high efficiency and low pollution. Even Henry Ford designed the Model T to run on alcohol, imagining a win-win for the auto industry and farmers who could sell surplus corn and grain as energy. Then, oil struck hard. The 1861 Civil War alcohol tax, coupled with the discovery of Pennsylvania oil, made gasoline cheaper, and alcohol vanished from mainstream use.

By the 1920s, General Motors engineer Charles Kettering revisited the idea, hoping to avoid environmental damage from leaded gasoline. Yet economic and political forces—especially oil lobbies—stifled the attempt. As Shere shows, every time biofuel rises, it meets resistance not because of its chemistry, but because of its economics. Oil has always been abundant, subsidized, and well-entrenched.

Gasohol and the Corn Revolution

The 1970s energy crisis revived biofuels in the form of “gasohol”—a blend of ethanol and gasoline. Jimmy Carter promoted domestic crops as a weapon against OPEC, though managed with mixed results. Farmers embraced the idea not for ideology but for survival; surplus grain could now power cars instead of rotting in silos. By the 1980s, with Archer Daniels Midland dominating ethanol production and Reagan’s free-market policies keeping subsidies alive, corn joined oil as a new symbol of American energy power.

But Shere highlights the contradictions: ethanol was cleaner, yet required fertilizer, machinery, and transport—all powered by fossil fuels. The supposed “green” solution created its own ecological loop of dependence. The modern food-vs-fuel debate, he argues, grew from this paradox: every renewable revolution risks becoming its opposite if scale and efficiency aren’t balanced.

Next-Gen Biofuel and Pond Scum Power

The book’s modern chapters leap forward to scientists like Tom Voigt and Bryan White at the University of Illinois, who cultivate tall grasses like miscanthus and dissect cow stomach bacteria to find enzymes that break down cellulose efficiently. The narrative culminates in Colorado, where researcher Bryan Willson turns microalgae into oil via Solix bioreactors—modern “ponds” that transform sunlight and CO₂ into fuel. These stories weave biology, engineering, and entrepreneurship into one vision: liquid energy grown, not drilled.

Shere closes this section reminding readers that every step toward cleaner fuel has deep roots. From Ford’s corn whiskey to modern algae labs, the dream has been the same—to transform life’s leftovers into motion. Whether these systems scale up or not, they echo a truth many have forgotten: the next energy gold rush won’t happen underground, but in the photosynthetic miracle of plants and microbes.

When Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof in 1979, he declared that “no one can embargo the sun.” Shere uses that hopeful moment to explore a much longer and richer story—one that stretches back to 19th-century inventors, visionary engineers, and quietly persistent scientists who tried, failed, and tried again to make the sun our primary power source.

Carter’s Symbolic Solar Moment

Carter’s solar initiative represented optimism after years of oil shocks. Yet the panels, designed merely to heat water, came down under Reagan’s administration, forgotten in storage until one ended up at Unity College in Maine. Shere calls this “the road not taken”—a national metaphor for our ambivalence toward clean energy. Yet the story of solar doesn’t end on that rooftop; instead, it reawakens decades later in unexpected places like airports and factories.

Ancient Light, Modern Machines

Solar zealots existed long before Carter. In the 1860s, French mathematician Augustin Mouchot built conical “sun engines” that made ice using concentrated mirrors—an engineering marvel applauded at the 1878 Paris Exposition. Frank Shuman revived the idea with a solar irrigation plant near Cairo in 1913, pumping Nile water to cotton fields until World War I halted progress. These episodes reveal how sunlight technology repeatedly rises from obscurity whenever fossil fuel instability strikes.

By 1953, scientists at Bell Labs—Daryl Chapin, Gerald Pearson, and Calvin Fuller—accidentally reinvented solar through silicon transistors, creating effective photovoltaic cells. These laid the groundwork for everything from rooftop panels to space satellites. Yet the industry’s future hinged not just on science but on manufacturing. Shere visits shuttered factories like Abound Solar and talks with engineers from First Solar and Uni-Solar who fought to make production as efficient as the light they captured. Even as many went bankrupt, the technology only improved.

The Sun’s New Factories

Modern solar companies shifted focus from breakthroughs to refinement. Subhendu Guha of Uni-Solar insists, “We don’t need a revolution—just continuous improvement.” Thin-film innovations, nanotech experiments from Purdue’s Hugh Hillhouse, and nanotube research at MIT all push solar cells toward using more wavelengths of light and doubling efficiency. Meanwhile, cultural shifts—from Germany’s feed-in tariffs to emotional pride of homeowners installing panels—create a movement, not just a market.

For Shere, solar energy embodies both frustration and faith: an ancient dream of capturing the sun’s abundance delayed by politics, cost, and habit. Yet as costs plummet and manufacturing scales up, he argues, the “solar revolution” may finally be less about invention and more about momentum—a quiet, steady dawn rather than a single sunrise.

Few technologies are as immediately visible—and controversial—as the giant white turbines sprouting across hills and plains. But Shere reminds us that wind power’s story began long before modern debates about noise, aesthetics, or bird safety. It’s a saga stretching from medieval windmills to Cleveland inventor Charles Brush’s 1880s wind dynamo and through the global wind renaissance of the 21st century.

Early American Wind and Forgotten Giants

Brush’s backyard wind machine, completed in 1888, was a marvel: an 80,000-pound turbine charging batteries to light his mansion. Yet it was a one-off marvel—too expensive, too ahead of its time. Later, Daniel Halladay’s self-regulating windmills transformed the American frontier, pumping water across arid plains and helping settle the West. Wind, Shere notes, was the “poor man’s power,” especially when rivers belonged to the rich.

Inventors like Palmer Cosslett Putnam revived wind’s promise during World War II with the colossal Smith-Putnam turbine in Vermont. It was the first to feed electricity to a grid, proving the concept decades before the modern wind farm. But again, funding, wartime shortages, and postwar oil abundance buried progress. The machine’s broken blade became a tombstone for early wind ambition.

The New Wind Age

Wind’s return came in two waves: first during the 1970s energy crises and again in the 2000s with climate awareness. Shere’s vivid scenes—from his family driving through the Fowler Ridge farms in Indiana to meeting rope-climbing turbine technicians at the Dallas Windpower Conference—transform abstract megawatts into human experience. He describes a “Disney World of wind,” where mechanics, safety trainers, and even shrink-wrap companies coexist to serve Big Wind’s booming infrastructure.

In Texas, modern turbines stand where oil derricks once ruled. Jobs multiply across manufacturing, maintenance, and logistics. Yet criticism persists—films like Windfall warn of health effects, aesthetics, and grid instability. Advocates counter with data: Denmark and Germany get up to 20% of electricity from wind. Shere suggests both sides miss the deeper lesson—that energy transitions are emotional as much as technical, provoking awe and anxiety in equal measure.

From castles to conference halls, from knights’ mills to megafarms, wind has been reborn many times. Today’s sleek turbines owe their existence to centuries of trial, error, and persistence. As one expert tells Shere: “The revolution already happened—it’s called manufacturing.” Now, the challenge isn’t to invent wind power, but to scale our ambition to match the wind’s potential.

Among the renewable forces, geothermal energy is the most invisible—heat hidden beneath our feet. Shere’s chapters on “Earth” take readers from a Midwestern campus to volcanoes and deep-drilling labs, showing how engineers have learned to tap steady, sustainable power stored inside the planet itself.

From Coal Boilers to Underground Networks

At Ball State University, engineering director Jim Lowe faced a crisis when aging coal boilers failed. His pragmatic decision to replace them with geothermal heating and cooling turned the campus into the largest closed-loop system in the country. Instead of burning fuel, Ball State now circulates water through 400-foot-deep pipes to exchange heat with the earth. The savings—both financial and environmental—make geothermal less glamorous than solar but far more dependable. “The earth does most of the work,” Lowe tells Shere.

The Geysers and the Power of Steam

In California’s Geysers region, 22 power plants run on superheated steam trapped deep below. Shere traces its unlikely origins: 19th-century resorts built around “witches’ cauldrons” of bubbling mud, later transformed into industrial-scale power. By injecting treated wastewater to replenish the underground steam, engineers turned a nearly depleted resource into a circular, renewable system. This creative recycling—turning sewage into steam—illustrates what Shere loves most about human ingenuity: sustainability born of necessity.

Hot Dry Rocks and the Edge of Experimentation

Beyond the Geysers lies geothermal’s frontier—Enhanced Geothermal Systems. Shere narrates the bold experiments at Los Alamos’s Fenton Hill project, where scientists Don Brown, Bob Potter, and Mort Smith spent decades drilling into granite to create artificial reservoirs of heat. Their perseverance led to breakthroughs in fracturing rock for heat extraction—a process eerily mirrored in today’s controversial fracking. Although the project was eventually defunded, its legacy continues in modern geothermal research worldwide, from Australia’s Cooper Basin to experimental high-tech drills using carbon dioxide. For Shere, geothermal remains proof that earth itself is the ultimate power plant—silent, consistent, and waiting patiently beneath our shoes.

In “Water,” Shere closes his elemental tour with the oldest renewable of all—hydropower—and its futuristic offshoots: tidal and wave energy. These chapters blend deep history with experimentation, showing how humanity’s relationship with moving water mirrors our larger energy journey—from mastery to cooperation.

Hydropower Then and Now

Shere revisits Niagara Falls in the 1890s, where engineers battled to harness nature’s fury. Thomas Edison championed DC power, but George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla’s alternating current won—culminating in the 1896 transmission that electrified New York. This was humankind’s first renewable megaproject, blending spectacle and science. The story reveals how every renewable revolution begins as philosophy: are we masters of nature or partners with it?

The New Tide

Fast-forward to 21st-century New York, where Verdant Power anchors turbines in the East River for its Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy project. Founder Trey Taylor braves bureaucracy, broken blades, and heavy currents before earning the first U.S. tidal energy license. It’s humbling work—machines destroyed by water that never stops flowing—but Taylor’s perseverance echoes Mouchot and Shuman’s solar crusades. Shere also visits Oregon’s coastline, where startups like Ocean Power Technologies and Aquamarine test buoy-based generators. Here, the rhythm of the ocean becomes electricity, but every breakthrough must withstand salt, corrosion, and regulation.

Salter’s Duck and the Wave That Was

Perhaps the most poignant story is Stephen Salter’s “Duck”—a 1970s wave converter that achieved 90% efficiency before being unfairly buried by bureaucratic politics. Shere sees in Salter’s saga the archetypal fate of renewable pioneers: visionary science undone by economics, not physics. The Duck survives today as inspiration for modern wave devices, proving how ideas, like tides, always return.

The final message: water’s motion—rivers, tides, and waves—has always powered us, from mill wheels to megawatts. While ocean energy still lags behind solar and wind, Shere argues its future is inevitable. The oceans store vast, predictable kinetic energy; all we lack is design fit for their wildness. The century ahead, he writes, may yet belong to the blue frontier, where “the sea itself becomes the grid.”

In the book’s epilogue, Shere returns to his central meditation: energy is invisible, and that invisibility is both comfort and danger. We flip switches, refuel cars, and live in illuminated homes without understanding the vast, fragile web that powers them. To make renewable energy succeed, he writes, we must make it visible again—seen not just as technology but as a human choice.

The Paradox of Comfort

Because energy feels effortless, we often ignore its origins. Shere compares electricity to magic—instantaneous, silent, odorless. Yet this illusion hides the true costs of fossil fuels: pollution, climate disruption, and dwindling reserves. He urges readers to look at energy the way Henry Ford, Mouchot, or Carter did—as a moral and creative frontier, not just a utility bill.

Optimism Grounded in History

Shere doesn’t romanticize progress. He knows renewable enthusiasm has come and gone before—the failed solar boom of the 1970s, the ethanol hype cycles, the misplaced faith in wind in the 1980s. Yet he’s convinced this time is different. Costs are falling, technologies are merging, and public awareness—however uneven—is growing. Across Germany, China, and the United States, renewables have become industries, not curiosities. Governments and engineers are learning what early dreamers always knew: that the planet itself provides more power than fossil fuels ever could.

Ultimately, Renewable asks you to reconsider what energy means. It’s not just carbon or current—it’s civilization’s story. Every time you turn on a light or charge your phone, you participate in that story. And as Shere concludes, the future depends on how visible we choose to make it—how consciously we decide to see the energy that shapes our lives and, more importantly, the kind of world it will illuminate next.