A world with no fossil fuel, no solar power and no nuclear power.

So the energy sources available would be:

• Wind power (Wind turbines and old fashioned windmills.)
• Hydro-power (Dams, wave power and old fashioned water wheels.)
• Geothermal energy (Not something that's very widely available.)
• Biofuel (I'm mostly looking at solid biofuels, which, as wikipedia lists, would include wood, sawdust, grass trimmings, domestic refuse, charcoal, agricultural waste, non-food energy crops, and dried manure.)

You can also use vegetable oil as biodiesel! ...but I don't want to have any planes with engines. But while I don't want people to drive around on cars, I want there to be land vehicles that don't need to be drawn by a horse, and I'm still trying to figure out what would those vehicles be and how they would be powered.

I kinda want this to be a renewable-energy-dystopia, so I don't want to solve too many problems. How much could the people in my setting screw up the world by the over-reliance on biofuel?

I also keep thinking about a good replacement for plastic. Bioplastic sounds like a huge waste of a food source, which might be a good thing, since I don't want my setting to be too happy.

edited 10th Jan '12 9:27:01 AM by fanty

The only fuels you haven't mentioned are wood, peat, and dung, which would almost certainly be this world's only pre-industrial fuels. Those who don't have the capital to invest in dams, turbines, and the other gear would still be using those renewable sources.

The trouble starts when the demand outstrips the supply. Europe started losing its great forests in the Renaissance, and without the discovery of two new continents, they might have deforested Africa and Asia as well.

Yeah, the massive deforestation is actually a plot point in the story. I should probably look into what kind of effects that would have. Though I suspect the effects wouldn't be as immediate as those caused by the production of liquid biofuel and such. Or maybe I should stop making stuff up and look into it.

EDIT: So it looks like all deforestation does is makes animal species go extinct and deprive forest-people of their home. The first one is something the people in my setting won't much care about, the second one is a plot point.

edited 10th Jan '12 11:20:46 AM by fanty

Another effect of deforestation is a permanent rise in the price of wood. If you're building and maintaining fleets of wooden ships, that can be a nasty surprise.

On the plus side, you open up a lot of land for crops, pasture, and golf courses.

The problem is, that without fossil fuels (ie coal) no-one would ever get far enough to start using iron, or possibly even metal.

Why?

Never mind. I was going to say that there wouldn't be enough charcoal to do anything much with, but reading up I realised I was wrong.

Industrialisation would be slower though, due to the need to conserve charcoal, and due to the fact that you'd probably have to switch to electricity faster due that need (in the sense the you'd need to develop electric tools and furnaces and the like faster, thus slowing down domestic production).

^^ Metalworking 101: Steel is made with coal by mixing it into molten iron in the smelting process. The better the coal the higher the carbon content in the steel and the stronger the steel becomes.

Prior to the invention of the Bessemer process in the industrial age, steelmaking was expensive and time consuming to do for quality steel. (It's why Japanese katana and other swords had such a complicated manufacturing process. Their steelmaking processes had a lot to be desired and the swordmaking process made up for the poor materials and alloys.)

Without coal there is no steel as we know it. (Charcoal is a very poor substitute.)

edited 10th Jan '12 4:21:09 PM by MajorTom

So in this sentence from wikipedia...

edited 10th Jan '12 4:28:05 PM by fanty

Yes. Coal the fossil fuel is basically the most abundant/dense source of carbon on the planet. Anthracite coal for instance is 97% pure carbon. (It's why compared to bituminous/lignite coal anthracite burns clean and smokeless with minimal ash.)

It's also extremely inexpensive compared to the other two dense sources: Graphite and Diamond.

edited 10th Jan '12 5:25:31 PM by MajorTom

How do you not have solar power? Do you just mean the photovoltaic effect?

Where does the producers get their energy? Does this world have a sun to begin with?

edited 11th Jan '12 5:00:33 AM by Blurring

^^ Basically, they don't have the technology needed to have solar power. There is a sun shining in the sky.

^ ???

@Major Tom: Electric arc furnaces need less coal if I trust my google results so maybe one could just use graphite or something with that? But I'm just making stuff up. Do we really need steel? There's something to replace it with, right? Carbon-fiber-reinforced bioplastic? Sounds expensive. I've already given this world bigger helium reserves than we have so maybe I could give them more graphite too.

edited 11th Jan '12 5:36:20 AM by fanty

So they have a sun but not the technology to capture the light energy. You almost made me think that this world is a sunless world powered by geothermal there.

Plastic?

Plastic, on the whole, comes from oil, which doesn't exist, so no plastics.

Bioplastic! On youtube, I saw them making it from milk and vinegar. You can make it from potato starch, too.

edited 11th Jan '12 6:23:52 AM by fanty

Solar doesn't require high-tech. High-efficiency solar requires high tech.

I think that you may be working within constraints you aren't aware that you've imposed on yourself. Or that you haven't mentioned here, at least.

Yup - even the Egyptians knew a solar cooker. Made of highly polished copper, as I recall. Not all that effective, but good when you've got no wood.

Well, the characters in my setting might have some kind of idea of using solar energy (I won't deny them the use of a solar cooker or a greenhouse), but I don't want them to have any solar panels or anything that would make them able to turn sunshine into electricity.

Solar thermal might well work even better than plain PV for electricity generation, and that's nothing more than, basically, a solar cooker focused on a water pipe that you can boil water in. If they've got the ability to do solar focusing, and the tech to run a dynamo off heated steam, you can get solar thermal.

You do if as a whole you want a technology level more advanced than 1600 AD.

That's more 'advanced' in our tech timeline, presumably? I'm sure you could achieve advanced civilizations and probably things like chemistry and computers without steel, but it would probably require taking a slightly different route that would be harder to predict.

Extremely difficult if possible at all. Many of the tools that make things like that are made of steel.

Or worse, their materials were developed directly because steel wasn't good enough. For instance titanium and aluminum aircraft alloys were developed because steel was too heavy to make a fast metal body aircraft able to do what the design wanted. (For instance military fighter jets made after 1960.)

Basically this is gonna be a hell of a Hand Wave and not much better.

Steel specifically yes, a sturdy material that could be used instead of steel, unlikely.