There is a rather long history of wind being used to transport goods, with horses as a backup when you must transport people or things in any weather regardless of waterways nearby. Alternative paths to industrial revolution may not have produced 21st century conveniences right away, but neither did the actual industrial revolution. You can power factories with pumped hydro.

There is a long history of sails, but even modern sails can go quite a bit faster than their ancient counterparts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_sailing#Appar...

The necessary developments in math and physics are not to be underestimated. I'm not disputing whether you could eventually do it without coal, I'm attacking the supposition that medieval-to-earlier civilizations (the Song Dynasty, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Roman Empire, etc) could have industrialized if they had only realized one or two key things. There's a whole framework of understanding that had to be established: calculus, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, et cetera; the Europeans had the benefit of importing knowledge from all over Eurasia, from paper (China, imported via Middle East ca. 1200s) to positional numerals (India), to algebra (al-Khwarizmi, born near Uzbekistan, worked in Baghdad). Leonardo Bonacci's schooling in Algeria was transformative for Italian mathematics. Et cetera.

A single wind turbine will only pump water at a measly rate up a large incline. In order to gather enough wind turbines' output to achieve useful energy storage, you need a means of transmission; the electric dynamo dates to 1831, while the electrostatic generator was developed around 1663, but could not operate while transmitting power. Pneumatics require, again, high precision. This stuff only seems easy now because we have so much understanding of the physical world that was unimaginable when Constantinople and Tenochtitlan were conquered. A modern train car can be pushed by hand; a sailing train car with the steel and lubricants available to da Vinci or Ben Sheng would hardly budge without a gale. Coal is so, so easy by comparison.

I think Tesla invented an electromechanical way to convert AC to DC.

Also, vacuum tubes work as rectifiers, and are much lower tech than semiconductors.

A weak vacuum was first produced by Torricelli in the early 17th century using a long mercury-filled tube, but the manufacture of an effective vacuum tube takes you right back to the same high-performance pneumatic engineering I mentioned for compressed-air storage — the first effective model produced by JJ Thomson in the mid-19th century, thereby discovering the electron, which was a necessary step for this to be even imagined.

But, to be fair, it's simpler than a semiconductor.

You can create an effective vacuum in a glass tube by filling it with mercury, inverting it, then heating the tube and pinching it off. This is all low tech.

BTW, Edison discovered vacuum tubes by playing around adding extra electrodes in his light bulbs. But he didn't realize what he'd discovered, and it went nowhere with him.

One can transform AC into DC without semiconductors. Vacuum tube technology is the first thing to come to mind. But it is practical even mechanically if the AC frequency is low enough.

DC generators work essentially the same as an AC alternator (motor in reverse). You can get AC-DC conversion by hooking these up to one another, just connect the rotors together.