An Introduction to “America’s Energy Supply” by C. P. Steinmetz SAIFUR RAHMAN, FELLOW, IEEE Invited Paper “America’s Energy Supply” was written by C. P. Stein- metz (Fig. 1), who was president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) in 1901 and a partner with Edison in the early days of the General Electric Company. This paper addresses America’s energy supply from the beginning of the twentieth century. There are three themes in this paper: efficiency and effectiveness of coal and hydrogeneration, cogeneration (to increase efficiency), and solar energy. In the 100-year period between the early 1800’s and early 1900’s, there was a steady increase in coal production from year to year, which experienced almost no interruptions from most of the catastrophic political and industrial convulsions of the nineteenth century, namely, the Civil War and the industrial panic of the 1890’s. Almost 80 years ago, when this paper was written, the use of coal was increasing at a rate of 6–10% per year, which led the author to predict that at that rate, 10 000 million tons of coal would be produced in the United States in 1958. But alternate sources of energy were quickly gaining acceptance after World War II. Even though the prediction did not materialize, primarily because of the advent of natural gas and oil as preferred energy sources, coal production has indeed steadily increased since then, reaching just over 1 billion tons in 1996, one-tenth of Steinmetz’s prediction for 1958. As coal and hydropower were used to supply the coun- try’s electric power needs at the time, one obvious question was what fuel source could be used to keep up with the growing demand for electricity. Hydropower, at its fullest potential of 230 million kW-h, could supply the total energy needs of the early twentieth century. That meant that as the energy demands grew, and the share of coal in the “generation mix” began to fall, the reliance on hydropower could not be total. This was probably the strongest argument for efforts to increase the efficiency of the methods for using coal. In the early 1900’s, the average efficiency of coal Manuscript received December 24, 1997. The author is with the ECS Division, National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA 22230 USA. Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9219(98)02495-5. Fig. 1. Steinmetz in his 1901 AIEE presidential photo. At Gen- eral Electric in 1900, he proposed a laboratory divorced from production problems, devoted to work on scientific fundamentals underlying company products. conversion to electricity was about 10%. If the efficiency of coal-to-electricity conversion could have been raised to 40%, as it is today, then the total electrical demand in the early twentieth century could have been met with only the coal mined in the United States at the time. The author made a strong case for cogeneration. At one point in the paper, he called it “an economic crime to burn coal for mere heating without first taking out as much high grade energy, mechanical or electrical, as is economically feasible.” In the early 1900’s, about 100 million tons of coal was used for heating purposes, most of it used for steam heat. The proposal was to generate this steam at a high pressure and to interpose between the steam boiler and the heating system some simple form of high-pressure steam turbine directly connected to an induction generator, which could then be tied to an electrical distribution system. It is interesting to note that even with a very inefficient steam turbine, the electricity generation in this process takes place at almost 100% efficiency because all the residual 0018–9219/98$10.00  1998 IEEE PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, VOL. 86, NO. 4, APRIL 1998 721