Ancient Energy Crisis Solved

RESEARCHERS have learned that about 2,500 years ago the ancient Greeks and Romans experienced an energy crisis of their own. Their most valuable fuel—wood—became extremely scarce because of its use in housing and shipbuilding, as well as in cooking and heating. But the ancients solved their energy problems with an up-to-date method—solar heating. A team of two solar-energy experts and a University of California classics professor have found that architecture designed to obtain the most heat from the sun was widely used for both individual homes and cities. For example, Pliny the Younger proudly explained how in the winter his villa north of Rome ‘collected and increased the heat of the sun’ by means of strategically located windows. According to the report in the New York Times, the researchers found that “the ancient town of Olynthus, in northern Greece, was comprised entirely of houses built on the same principles used today in ‘passive’ solar homes—those lacking solar collectors but designed, insulated and sited to gather as much heat as possible from the sun in winter and as little as possible in the summer.” Said one investigator: “Olynthus is proof that planning for the use of solar heat was possible on a large urban scale in antiquity, and it suggests that solar design can be just as successfully applied to modern urban settings.”