Introduction for Mountain Battery

Introduction

“But suppose I treated these very fissures and crevasses as letters, attempted to decipher them, shaped them into words, and learned to read them, would you have any objection to that?”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister (1795–1796)

IN 1889, A FRENCH ENGINEER named Aristide Bergès attended the Exposition Universelle in Paris to inform the world of a new form of energy he had discovered. The site for this revelation was the gigantic glass and iron Galerie des machines, located across the Champ de Mars from the main attraction of the fair, Gustave Eiffel’s tower. Here, the graduate of the prestigious École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures and proprietor of a successful paper mill, set up one of the numerous exhibitions on French industry that filled the sprawling display area. Bergès’s exhibit displayed a device he had been instrumental in developing, as well as some fairly bold claims about its potential.

The display consisted of a metallic turbine measuring two meters in diameter. This innovation of the early nineteenth century amounted to a reinvention of the wheel—the waterwheel in this case. Unlike the waterwheel, turbines could cope with the destructive force of water falling from great heights. They had been developed as part of an effort to help waterpower stimulate the same sort of commercial explosion occasioned by rapidly spreading steam engines. While Bergès had not invented the turbine himself, he was among the first to adapt it to handle high-pressure waterpower. Emphasizing this fact, the turbine was placed above a plaster relief map depicting a small section of the French Alps (Figure I.1). On a plaque attached to the turbine stood a long inscription that began with the words “exploitation of the WHITE COAL (HOUILLE BLANCHE) of the glaciers by the creation of chutes between 500 and 2000 meters in height.”¹

By “white coal,” Bergès meant the waterpower of France’s glaciated Alpine peaks. With the help of the turbine, he had managed to draw power from several torrents emerging from these white glacial snowfields high above the Alpine city of Grenoble. The energy derived from the creation of artificial “chutes”—in this case, iron pipes—through which the water from high-altitude streams plunged several hundred meters before being conducted to the turbines that powered Bergès’s paper mill and a growing number of industrial establishments.

FIGURE I.1 Bergès’s “White Coal” exhibit.Courtesy of the Maison Bergès - Département de l’Isère (France).

In a pamphlet accompanying the exhibit, Bergès explained that white coal was of course a metaphor. But he used the term to emphasize that glacial runoff could become “riches just as precious as coal for their region and for the state.” Bergès predicted even more from this new energy source. While coal produced the iron that had “made our civilization and our century, of which the Eiffel Tower is in a sense the poem,” white coal also possessed great potential. For white coal, “the economic force of electricity,” could produce aluminum, a metal that was “light as glass, firm as iron, rustproof like silver, and certainly the secret of the future.” Due to these advantages, aluminum would become prevalent in vehicle construction, in “tools of war,” and would “open aerial navigation to us.” Bergès concluded that aluminum derived from white coal “will give its name to the new century if it comes at a sufficiently good price.”²

Bergès’s words were prophetic, even if aluminum did not quite put its stamp on the twentieth century in the same way iron did for the previous one.³ From its debut at the World’s Fair, white coal would go on to have an impressive if not widely appreciated career. Not only would the label become a common way to describe hydropower the world over, but the actual waterpower of the Alps was put to mighty use by Europeans. The new energy source not only provided power for a new sort of industrial economy, as the Frenchman had predicted, but actively helped shape it. For reasons this book will explore, hydroelectricity proved to be the major alternative to coal in generating electricity on the European continent in the early twentieth century, and the Alps became one of the global centers of its production. Understanding why and how the Alps became one of the foremost landscapes of electricity in Europe has much to tell us about modern energy use and the history of the lands that drew this power from the mountains.

In the wake of the Exposition, interest in white coal exploded. So lucrative was the potential energy of the Alps that efforts to tap it became one of the main drivers of innovation in the new field of electrification. Up until the First World War, the belief in the superiority of Alpine waterpower led Europeans to make it the foremost substitute to coal in electricity production. Many of the world’s largest hydroplants sprang up within the mountain arc, making the Alps a center of the modern industries associated with the “second industrial revolution.”⁴

When in the fall of 1914 it became clear that Europe’s soldiers would not be home before the leaves fell, white coal emerged as the most important alternative to coal in powering war production. In the interwar years, white coal became entangled in competing visions of energy. One party saw large-scale exploitation of Alpine hydropower as a means to produce international cooperation and economic growth. The other spied in the mountain heights the key to autarkic self-sufficiency and even racial survival. As the 1930s wore on, the latter view increasingly won ground. Though it has not been fully recognized, Nazi planners in particular saw Alpine waterpower as essential to their expansionist program. In part because such energy took time to develop, the fascist war effort came up short. But after the war, Europeans returned to the earlier vision of developing Alpine hydropower as a means to rebuild devastated societies and foster the international cooperation and prosperity that would prevent a repeat of the supremacist violence. By the early postwar period, over half of western Europe’s electricity—and a quarter of the Continent’s total—was generated by Alpine water. Of course, all of this new energy development necessitated dramatic interventions into politics, society, and culture. It also remade the Alpine environment. In exploiting white coal, Europeans completely replumbed the Alps, the “water tower” of Europe, with consequences—both anticipated and unintended—to this day.

Energy is one of the most pressing current issues for global society. In light of global warming and a cluster of other environmental problems, transitioning away from fossil fuels to other “renewable” or “green” sources of energy is viewed by many policymakers and experts as essential. Given the centrality of renewables in our current energy discussions, understanding of their development is key. Since the 1980s there has been a growing interest in the history of energy use, particularly for the modern period characterized by unprecedented energy consumption.⁵ However, there are still important gaps in our knowledge. To date the history of fossil fuels has received the lion’s share of attention.⁶ There have been far fewer attempts to write comprehensive histories of renewable energy sources as such.⁷ This imbalance means that our understanding of a fundamental aspect of modern energy history—and the context for current energy policy—is distorted.

This book tells the history of Alpine hydroelectricity. It is a story about mountains, water, and power in Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century until the present. In seeking to explain how the Alps became one of the most important energy landscapes worldwide, I argue that we should take seriously the insight of Aristide Bergès in styling the energy “white coal.” The history of Alpine waterpower—and, I argue, of so-called renewable energy sources in general—cannot be understood without grasping the assumptions that lie behind this label. First, coal was the backdrop to all of these changes. The book’s subtitle refers to the “age of fossil fuels” to signal my belief that the fundamental framework for understanding what happened in the Alps—and modern energy development as well—is that it has occurred under the sign of coal, oil, and gas.

The movement to exploit Alpine energy on a grand scale took place in the context of the epochal transition to intensive coal use in the early nineteenth century. This transition, which first took place in England and from there slowly spread across the globe, was so momentous that it deserves to stand alongside the discovery of fire and the shift to agriculture as the most consequential in human history. For reasons that I detail in the body of this book, coal removed previous limits on both energy use and, consequently, economic growth. For now it is enough to say, as many have, that coal’s property as a fossil fuel meant that it had potent short-term advantages compared to alternatives. The ancient sunshine stored within could be accessed immediately. It did not require, as other fuels did, large amounts of land to be cultivated over a period of years, sometimes decades.

The prospect of making coal the cornerstone of a new energy era, however, first arrived with a machine that could take this thermal energy and make it lift, rotate, work. This was the steam engine. When fed with coal, it launched an energy revolution still underway today. In many ways it powered the industrial revolutions that remade economy and society worldwide.⁸ Coal-fired industrialization in some parts of the globe also touched off a scramble for new sources of energy in other places. The goal was to replicate the economic dynamism of steam power. In this context, Europeans could begin to spy potential energy in mountain torrents. A change in energy systems spurred new environmental perceptions.

Second, ideas about the virtues of coal as an energy source decisively influenced the development of Alpine waterpower. The Alps became one of the global centers of hydroelectric production because, in the eyes of contemporaries, mountain waterpower was the form of natural energy that could be forced to behave most like coal. Coal, the argument went, was not subject to the geographic limitations or seasonal fluctuations that plagued water, wind, and solar power. It was energy that could be used anywhere in the world a steam engine could be brought—and at any time. This viewpoint ignored the herculean efforts it took to wrest the mineral from the ground, ship it around the world, and feed it to hungry boilers. Perhaps this omission emanated from an unspoken assumption that the necessary human labor could be wrangled more reliably than the forces of nature. The mountains, however, had an advantage in this regard. Above all, the lakes and glaciated valleys of the Alps represented opportunities to store fickle waterpower. In this manner, more so than other flows of natural energy like wind or even the waterpower of the plains, white coal could be made to act like a fuel. Over the course of the twentieth century, the argument that the Alps should be exploited for this feature won the day. The result was the creation of what I call Europe’s battery, a gigantic system for storing hydraulic energy and counteracting renewable energy’s Achilles heel.⁹ The Alps have become a hybrid landscape, where the line between the natural and the technological has become blurred.¹⁰

To understand the historical development of a renewable energy source, I chose not to frame this study as a history of hydroelectricity, but of Alpine hydroelectricity. This, then, is a history not of just an energy source but of an energy landscape and its modification by humans. The concept of energy landscapes has received some attention in the past, both as a way to grasp the environmental implications of energy use and to understand the broader dynamics that have led to energy transitions.¹¹ Implicit in the concept is that we need to consider more than just an energy source itself to understand its development and the wider impacts of its use. Using it here made sense for a couple of reasons. First, as Bergès has shown us, contemporaries actually distinguished between Alpine waterpower and other forms. That is to say that at the time, Europeans themselves perceived the Alps as a unique energy landscape. More importantly, waterpower is not simply inherent to water but depends on its environmental context. It was not only the water that mattered, but the reality that it flowed down steep slopes that imparted energy and through narrow canyons that seemed to make for ideal places to impound and store water. Where I am writing near the mouth of the Mississippi River, the sheer volume of water flowing represents considerable potential energy. The problem is trying to create a fall large enough to harness the flow. Such a dam would flood an enormous area and be difficult to anchor it in the landscape. In the Alps, Europeans supposed that nature had already done much of the necessary work by creating lakes and valleys that could be conveniently closed off. Landscape decisively influences the physical characteristics of flowing water—and humans’ ability to manipulate it. In dealing with water in particular, its location—the mountains, the plains, the delta—matters.¹²

The Alps have become a landscape of electrification, and for that reason the mountains are an important part of that broader story. It is a story whose significance for modern energy history is vastly underappreciated. Modern energy histories tend to privilege the intensive use of fossil fuels as the most momentous occurrence. As noted, coal, oil, and gas represent a true energy windfall for societies and offer unparalleled versatility. It is also true that in absolute terms, the majority of energy deployed by humans since 1800 has come from fossil fuels. Several realities often go unrecognized in this regard, however. First, statistics that show the dominance of fossil fuels rarely note that most of the energy unleashed was not harnessed by humans but lost in the form of wasted heat. The eye-popping numbers can be misleading in this regard. Second, a large and steadily increasing share of fuel has been burned to produce another form of energy: electricity. Most of the world’s electric current comes from fossil fuels.¹³ Only electricity, that most versatile of energy sources, has made possible our modern, high-tech society. As one historian has noted, we can construct electric cars, trains, and to some extent aircraft. But can you picture a world run by steam-powered computers?¹⁴ And I would add that it is electrified factories that produce the cars, planes, and ships that burn hydrocarbons.

Not surprisingly, then, historians have produced excellent research on the emergence and spread of electricity. With some important exceptions, however, most studies have focused on the history of electrification in urban or national settings.¹⁵ As hydroelectricity played an important role in the electrification of many countries, some scholars have also focused on the significance of water in this development. The overwhelming majority of these works, however, conceive of electricity in terms of either a commodity or a technology—not as an energy source. They also treat water more as a static natural resource than a dynamic product of earth’s life support systems.¹⁶ The rise of environmental history since the 1970s has increasingly produced analyses that also consider the environmental sources of hydroelectric energy and its impacts.¹⁷

Something new is added by tracing the history of the Alpine energy landscape: the central role that the mountains played in the development of the electrical technology that continues to undergird our modern grids. As I will show, many of the decisive innovations required to transmit electricity over long distances arose out of efforts to bring the power of the mountains to the plains. Seen from the Alps, then, early electrification was as much about remote rural waterfalls as it was about Edison light bulbs in posh city quarters. From this perspective, the problem of renewable energy has not been peripheral but at the heart of modern energy concerns. The effort to utilize renewable energy led to the promotion of a technology—electricity—that enabled the dramatic expansion of fossil fuel use. The Alps and the globe’s coal seams and oil patches are all part of the same story.

The Alps were a landscape of energy transitions as well. For historians looking at energy use in the past, one of the primary questions is how changes in energy use occur.¹⁸ It is not hard to see why. Explaining why they happen is not only of historical interest. At a moment when shifting away from fossil fuels seems necessary to avert catastrophic global warming, it would be helpful to know how transitions have functioned in the past. The concept of energy transitions is not without detractors.¹⁹ But a generally shared conclusion is that energy transitions do not happen overnight. Most large-scale transitions have taken decades, and in this regard white coal is no exception.²⁰

Still another question is why societies adopt new energy sources or—as is more frequently the case—ways of converting or storing them. One group represents what might be called the necessity school. This point of view squares with the adage that necessity is the mother of invention. So, for example, the shift to intensive coal use in England and elsewhere was encouraged by increasing wood shortages.²¹ These are rationalist economic arguments that as one resource becomes scarce, movements to substitute another resource gain momentum. Another school has emerged suggesting that recent energy transitions in particular have been driven by entrepreneurs who have identified vast supplies of potential energy resources and then attempted to convince others of the wisdom of using them.²² Still another group argues for the unintended nature of energy developments and the importance of political expediency.²³

If one understands an energy transition not as a change in primary energy supply, but simply as a change in the ways that societies generate, store, and transport energy as I do, then the following pages document multiple substantial transitions. First, the introduction of the turbine finally enabled the full exploitation of the great falls of mountain waterpower. Next, coupling turbines to generators gave rise to a new energy source—hydroelectricity—with all of its peculiarities. The use of high-voltage alternating current to transport this energy overland also represented a crucial change in energy use. From today’s perspective, these developments are interesting because they also signify a transition to an intensive use of renewable energy. In general, the experience in the Alps suggests that transitions defy simple categories. In the early years, market considerations played a crucial role in the spread of mountain waterpower. Alpine hydropower’s initial success had much to do with its “discovery” and promotion by businessmen like Bergès. White coal, in other words, was initially slick marketing. However, the ultimate boom in Alpine hydropower owed its rise to contingency—the World Wars—and the decision on the part of state entities across the Alps to take an active role in the energy sector and force its expansion.

A major recent debate in energy history has centered around whether particular energy regimes have led to specific political outcomes. The theory that dependence on oil revenue makes for undemocratic states—the “oil curse”—is one aspect of this discussion. An influential recent thesis argues that democratization in nineteenth-century Europe was fundamentally connected to its emerging coal regime. According to this view, the physical nature of this fuel—that it is a bulky solid requiring considerable effort to remove from the ground and transport—made the region’s economy vulnerable to labor disruption. Since coal will not move on its own but requires people to move it, workers had leverage to demand political reforms. The twentieth-century corollary is that liquid oil defies worker control, and states built atop the production of hydrocarbons have escaped comparable pressures to democratize.²⁴ In the Alps, the connection between politics and energy turns these equations on their head. Here political circumstances shaped energy development. The legal reality that water was in many cases a common good ensured that the state would play a major role in adjudicating its use. So too did the fact that modifying flows of water had wide-reaching societal effects. After the emergency of the First World War, governments throughout the Alps capitalized on their sovereignty over water resources and drove a surge in white coal development to secure domestic energy supply. The public hand would remain the dominant force in Alpine hydropower development until the liberalization of European energy markets at the end of the millennium. One major lesson from the uplands, then, may be that large-scale transitions to renewable energy require an active state role.

Writing a history of the transformation of the Alpine environment is also a different way of looking at modern European history. The history of this region and most others continues to be conceived primarily on a national basis.²⁵ There are good and understandable reasons for this reality. For one thing, the history profession as we now know it first developed in order to tell the story of the rise of nations. The academic discipline of history as it is currently practiced emerged in nineteenth-century Germany, and its acolytes consciously took the history of the nascent German “nation” to be its object of focus.²⁶ Historians ever since have almost reflexively defaulted to concentrating on the history of nations. When one trains to be a historian these days, it is still most common to become an expert in French, or US, or Chinese history. In the meantime—in part because of the efforts of national historians—people throughout the world often think of themselves in national terms. National identity is one of the most prominent forms of collective identity. And most people view world affairs through the lens of nationality. It follows then, that for many types of history, the national scale makes most sense.

But for many environmental topics, stopping at national borders promises to miss critical aspects of the story.²⁷ Environmental phenomena often operate without respect for lines on maps. The geologic processes that created the Alps did so eons before anything like national boundaries existed. The waterways that carve the peaks blithely transgress borders. Taking a geographical landscape like the Alps as the framework for a history shifts our perspective on these lands during this time period and challenges the assumptions that underlie some national histories. What does it mean, for instance, that monarchies in Italy or Bavaria built similar dams, as a republic, in France? Or that the same dam in the Austrian Alps was welcomed by liberal internationalists and National Socialists?²⁸ By following the changes in the mountain landscape, we can see that various nationalities and political groupings were united more by their commonalities than separated by their differences. In place of fragmented histories of national development, a story emerges about the interplay between environmental conditions and societies in a peculiar part of the world.²⁹ The timing of the modifications of the Alpine landscape, moreover, suggest the centrality of international factors—the World Wars and their aftermaths—for the fate of Europe’s environments.

Turning our attention to this region, often considered peripheral, also reveals an alternative history of modern European economic development. The traditional story of industrial Europe focuses on steam-driven, heavy industrial development.³⁰ The changes to Europe’s most iconic mountain range are a testament to the existence of another Europe, one that tried to compensate for its lack of fossil fuels through intense manipulation of water.³¹ This history of a European energy landscape also suggests a possible “special path” for the region’s energy past.³² Almost forty years ago, one historian defined the history of American energy use as “coping with abundance.” What he meant above all was that the United States had the uncommon luxury of having many energy options to satisfy demand. This has been a considerable boon to American businesses and entrepreneurs, but it has also often led to profligate energy use.³³ In many ways, continental Europe’s energy past is and has been the opposite phenomenon. Western and Central Europe are composed of medium and small states with far narrower resource bases than countries such as the United States, China, or Russia. There is much greater pressure in these areas to economize with energy. The transformation of the Alps is the physical manifestation of West-Central Europe’s coping with scarcity.

Since Fernand Braudel began his epic postwar history of the Mediterranean world with a section on mountains—“Tout d’abord les montagnes”—there has been increasing interest in the uplands of the past. Braudel’s conception of the mountains has also proved durable. For him, upland regions have by definition stood apart from the more crucial developments on the plains. Due to their unforgiving terrain, Braudel supposed, mountains could not support the development of urban civilization that has been the primary driver of history. The French historian saw the Alps as somewhat of an outlier in this regard, a montagne exceptionnelle due to undeniable traces of high culture.³⁴ In the intervening time, numerous historians have put mountains first by writing histories of the Alps.³⁵ Studies have shown us how the mountains have figured centrally in the formation of national identities and even what it means to be modern.³⁶

A recent history takes up Braudel’s question of the specialness of the Alps as its main theme.³⁷ It finds that, in many ways, the Alps are exceptional. From a comparative perspective, these mountains have been more heavily populated since the late medieval period than other European or global highlands. But this characteristic has had much to do with the peculiarity of its surrounding areas. These regions have long been the seats of epic empires, temporal and spiritual, and some of the most economically dynamic spots in recent history. It was their dramas that led personages such as Hannibal and Napoleon to attempt legendary crossings of the mountains, bringing notoriety to the Alps by association. Since the Enlightenment and industrialization visited Europe in the last three centuries, tourists have begun flocking to the mountains en masse. They came seeking, in the words of an early British Alpinist, “the playground of Europe.”³⁸And their tourism has transformed society and economy in the Alps as for no other range in the world. In terms of energy, this book will show, the Alps are exceptional as well. No other upland region on the globe has been modified to store power as have the Alps.

Historians, it has been said, can be “splitters” or “lumpers.” That is, when trying to reconstruct the past, they can tend to emphasize the peculiarity of phenomena or the commonalities and connections between them.³⁹Mountain Battery falls decidedly into the lumping category. This is in part because the lower resolution of histories of a larger scale causes some objects to blend together. It would not be possible to write histories beyond the individual subject without generalization. But it also stems from my assessment that, across space and time, significant consensus existed about the making of the Alpine energy landscape. At times in the book, I will refer to things that “engineers” or “Swiss” or “Europeans” believed or did. This is not meant to suggest the absence of dissenting opinions or actions in a given group. But in general, I do recognize more similarities across groups. Europeans in this region ultimately transformed a shared mountain landscape in comparable ways. This was in part because the various states were constantly taking note of the others’ progress. But above all, modern energy-intensive society presented states with similar pressures and choices. The record suggests a convergence of outcomes.

In seeking to understand how and why Europeans modified the landscape in a certain way, this book focuses primarily on the actions and thoughts of engineers, politicians, and economists. There would be other ways to tell this story, ones that focus more on the role that consumers of energy played, for instance. Those energy historians who point out the necessity of paying more attention to the demand side of the power equation are surely correct.⁴⁰ But it is a contention of this book that elite decision-makers in positions of power possessed outsized influence in determining the shape the Alps ultimately took. That these were mostly well-to-do white men does not mean that categories like class, race, and gender played no role in this story. On the contrary, questions about what it meant to be bourgeois, masculine Europeans in the early twentieth century were inextricably linked to the choices they made and how they understood them. The historical sources that they left behind—in government archives, in the pages of journals, and the protocols of international conferences—make up the bulk of the evidence for this study. If elites did carry more weight in reality, it has important consequences for how we understand phenomena such as energy transitions and environmental change.

The history of white coal also sheds light on the malleable nature of energy. Though few things could seem more material, what exactly composes the stuff is hard to define. Energy as a concept, moreover, is a rather recent one. Tracing how Europeans defined what constituted acceptable uses of hydropower, moreover, must leave one with the impression that a fair amount of imagination went into determining where, when, and how it should be used. The key is present in the very distinction that Bergès made between his energy source and others. White coal was superior because it derived from glaciers, meaning the flows upon which it depended were more regular than for other waterways. The towering falls that could be exploited in the Alps supposedly made Alpine waterpower cheaper too. Since the great relief multiplied the effectiveness of falling water, one could harvest more energy per drop of water than in the plains. This meant that all the necessary equipment—canals, pipes, turbines, and powerhouses—could be of smaller dimension.⁴¹

All of the distinctions imply that there would be many different ways to create the hydraulic pressure needed for useable energy. Rarely did a white coal proponent note that some of these advantages might be nullified by the reality that construction projects are more difficult in the mountains, and maintenance more frequently required. Remoteness from centers of consumption also increased the cost of transport for materials and of electricity too. The history of white coal shows just how much human culture goes into determining where useful energy can be found, how it should be harnessed, and for whose benefit. To speak with the literature on the history of nationalism, energy is very much “imagined” or “invented.”⁴² The outsize role that imagination can play in siting hydropower plants may be a peculiarity of the energy source.

Finally, a word about the narrative arc of this book. One way of reading this history of a renewable energy source is as a triumphal success story. In these pages you will read how scientists and inventors made new discoveries and created new, seemingly miraculous technologies. At the behest of leaders and politicians, engineers designed new systems that laborers implemented with their sweat and toil. Oftentimes these efforts were portrayed in heroic terms, with humans mastering the powers of nature for the common good. In reality, the process was much messier. Plans to modify Alpine hydrology met with opposition always and everywhere. Bold promises of superlative energy bounties went unfulfilled, dams sometimes failed. Where possible, I try to show how the confident pronouncements associated with white coal were always based on particular points of view. I also try to do justice to the messiness by zooming in on cases at the local level. Hydroelectric development in the Alps—like all human actions—failed to realize its lofty goals and resulted in unintended consequences. I hope the reader will keep these caveats in mind.

Notes

1. Marcel Mirande, Le Comte de Cavour et la Houille Blanche (Grenoble: Allier Père & Fils, 1927), 5–6. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. The turn of phrase on the waterwheel comes from David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 7.

2. Louis André, Aristide Bergès, une vie d’innovateur: De la papeterie à la houille blanche (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 2013), 199–201.

3. A recent consideration of aluminum’s role in the twentieth century, however, does make the case for the metal’s centrality: Mimi Sheller, Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

4. Though the term is rarely defined precisely, it commonly refers to the new cluster of industries that revolutionized economies in the latter third of the nineteenth century. Electricity is often grouped with chemicals and steel.

5. Jean-Claude Debeir, Jean-Paul Deléage, and Daniel Hémery, In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilization Through the Ages (London: Zed Books, 1991); Rolf Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press, 2001); Vaclav Smil: Energy in World History (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994); James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron: University of Akron Press, 1997); Alfred W. Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde, Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

6. Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest; Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (New York: Free Press, 1991); Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Simon Pirani, Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption (London: Pluto Press, 2018); Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); William T. Vollmann, Carbon Ideologies, 2 vols. (New York: Viking, 2018). A recent spate of studies have focused in particular on coal: Victor Seow, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); On Barak, Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016); Shellen Xiao Wu, Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).

7. This is not to say that no research on renewable energy exists. Dams are often explored in histories of water and electrification. But studies focusing on their trajectory as energy sources are rare. Some exceptions are Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994); Matthew Evenden, Allied Power: Mobilizing Hydro-Electricity During Canada’s Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); David Massell, Amassing Power: J. B. Duke and the Saguenay River, 1897–1927 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000); Matthias Heymann, Die Geschichte der Windenergienutzung, 1890–1990 (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1995). A recent history of an alternative fuel is Jennifer Eaglin, Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

8. Historians have understood coal to be so unique that its intensive use inaugurated new energy epochs. J. R. McNeill describes the energy regime prior to the Industrial Revolution as “somatic”—coming mostly from bodies. Thereafter he uses the term “fossil fuel age” once the transition to intensive coal use had begun: Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 10–16. E. A. Wrigley argues that coal brought about an “energy revolution” from an “organic” to an “energy-rich” economy: Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). In his classic study of waterpower in the United States, Louis C. Hunter also chose to frame the development of this energy source against the backdrop of coal’s ascendancy: Waterpower in the Century of the Steam Engine (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1979).

9. Thanks to the importance of storage for energy systems, environmental historians have recently begun exploring the history of batteries: James Morton Turner, Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022).

10. Richard White influentially advanced the idea of the “organic machine” as the product of human modification of landscapes. In a sense, my work builds on this idea by attempting to characterize the specific type of machine (battery) that Europeans tried to construct in the Alps. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). The Alps can also be understood as an “envirotechnical landscape”: Sara B. Pritchard, Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

11. Brian Black coined the term “petrolia” (Petrolia, 2000) to capture the broader “biotic reaction” that occurred thanks to the first oil boom in the United States. Christopher F. Jones referred to “landscapes of intensification” to tease out how the addition of transport infrastructure to an energy source enabled it to be utilized intensively: Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 6–10.

12. An important theme of this book is that it is in some cases misleading to consider the history of water separately from its surroundings. For this reason, in his “biography” of the Rhine River, author Mark Cioc divides the river into sections based on the prevailing geomorphology: The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); rivers are analyzed in connection to cities in Martin Knoll, Uwe Lübken, and Dieter Schott, eds., Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained: Rethinking City-River Relations (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). A recent edited volume on the rivers of the Alps brings together interdisciplinary research on upland waterways and also includes explorations of human interactions with these environments. See, for example, Gertrud Haidvogl, Didier Pont, and Žiga Zwitter, “Geschichte menschlicher Nutzungen und Eingriffe: Alpenflüsse als Ressource und Risiko,” in Flüsse der Alpen: Vielfalt in Natur und Kultur, eds. Susanna Muhar et al. (Bern: Haupt, 2019), 36–45.

13. Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 39–42.

14. Vaclav Smil, Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 39.

15. The literature on electrification is vast, and only some key works can be cited here: Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); William J. Hausman, Peter Hertner, and Mira Wilkins, Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Julie A. Cohn, The Grid: Biography of an American Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); Vincent Lagendijk, Electrifying Europe: The Power of Europe in the Construction of Electricity Networks (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008).

16. Serge Paquier, Histoire de l’électricité en Suisse: La dynamique d’un petit pays européen 1875–1939, 2 vols. (Geneva: Ed. Passé Présent, 1998). On France, see Histoire génerale de l’électricité en France, 3 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1991–1996). On Italy, see Storia dell’industria elettrica in Italia, 5 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1992–1994).

17. Jones, Routes of Power; Casey P. Cater, Regenerating Dixie: Electric Energy and the Modern South (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019); Robert D. Lifset, Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014).

18. See, for instance, the special issue on energy transitions: Yves Bouvier and Giovanni Paoloni, eds., “Transitions in Energy History: History in Energy Transitions,” special issue, Journal of Energy History/Revue d’Histoire de l’Énergie, no. 4 (June 2020).

19. Some scholars challenge the idea of energy transitions in the first place. There is indeed a lack of clarity about what, precisely, is meant by the term “transitions,” and its various uses can lead to confusion. Taken together, these voices are correct that the term should not be adopted uncritically, and that discussing transitions on national or global scales masks local particularities. But some of this fervor is misplaced and seems to rest on the reading that authors using the transition label imply that previous energy sources are abandoned. See, for example, Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2017), 100–104.

20. Smil, Energy Transitions, viii.

21. David Blackbourn, “The Culture and Politics of Energy in Germany: A Historical Perspective,” RCC Perspectives, no. 4 (2013): 8.

22. Jones, Routes of Power, 5.

23. Ian Miller et al., “Forum: The Environmental History of Energy Transitions,” Environmental History 24, no. 3 (July 2019): 463–533; Blackbourn, “The Culture and Politics of Energy in Germany,” 8; Charles-François Mathis and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, eds., Sous le soleil: Systèmes et transitions énergétiques du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Paris: Sorbonne, 2019).

24. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011).

25. Which is not to suggest that only national histories exist. A recent example of a modern European environmental history is Patrick Kupper, Umweltgeschichte (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021). Historians of technology in the Tensions of Europe network have written transnational European histories through the lens of technology, particularly in their Making Europe book series (makingeurope.eu). Per Högselius, Arne Kaijser, and Erik van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) is especially relevant for hydropower development in the Alps.

26. Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968).

27. On transnational environmental history, see Sterling Evans, “Recent Developments in Transnational Environmental History: Labor, Settler Communities, and Comparative Histories,” Radical History Review 107 (Spring 2010): 195–208.

28. One aspect of the appeal might be found in their symbolism: Paul Josephson, Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002).

29. It should be noted that this history of a transnational landscape of necessity made choices about where to focus. Though the analysis leaves out some national settings—Yugoslavia/Slovenia most notably—I contend that the patterns presented here in general hold true for the entire region.

30. See, for example, David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

31. Giacomo Parrinello, “Systems of Power: A Spatial Envirotechnical Approach to Water Power and Industrialization in the Po Valley of Italy, ca.1880–1970,” Technology and Culture 59, no. 3 (July 2018): 652–688. Parrinello makes this case clearly for Italian industrialization in the Po basin, while also demonstrating its connections to preindustrial waterpower use.

32. Here I borrow a term often utilized in the historiography of Germany and Europe to describe a historical trajectory that diverges from the norm. See, for example, Rolf Peter Sieferle, Der Europäische Sonderweg. Ursachen und Faktoren (Stuttgart: Breuninger, 2003).

33. Martin V. Melosi, Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America (New York: Knopf, 1985).

34. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 25–53.

35. Paul Guichonnet, Histoire et civilisations des Alpes, 2 vols. (Toulouse: Privat, 1980); Werner Bätzing, Die Alpen: Geschichte und Zukunft einer europäischen Kulturlandschaft (Munich: Beck, 2003); Jon Mathieu, Geschichte der Alpen 1500–1900: Umwelt, Entwicklung, Gesellschaft (Vienna: Böhlau, 2001). See also the annual journal Histoire des Alpes—Storia delle Alpi—Geschichte der Alpen published by the International Association for Alpine History (located at the University of Lugano) since 1995.

36. Marco Armiero, A Rugged Nation: Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy (Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press, 2011); Patrick Kupper, Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park, trans. Giselle Weiss (New York: Berghahn, 2014); Tait Keller, Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Andrew Denning, Skiing into Modernity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).

37. Jon Mathieu, The Alps: An Environmental History, trans. Rose Hadshar (Boston: Polity, 2019).

38. Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1871).

39. Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981), x.

40. One example is David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).

41. For this reason, a professor at an Austrian mining academy characterized “relief” as a natural resource, no different than iron ore, coal, or oil. Bartel Granigg, Die Wasserkraftnutzung in Österreich und deren geograpischen Grundlagen (Vienna: Springer, 1925), 1. The question of the price of hydroelectricity was often advanced as an argument in favor of the source over coal. In general, the most lucrative hydropower sites offered the lowest unit prices for electricity of any energy source. Typically, the main economic disadvantage of white coal was portrayed as its very large upfront costs. By contrast, the operating costs of hydropower facilities were comparatively lower, tipping the scales in favor of hydropower over the long term. For an exemplary discussion of the economics of white coal (and a rare contemporary analysis of hydropower composed by a woman), see Alice Schirmer, “Die schweizerischen Wasserkräfte als wirtschaftliches Gut,” PhD dissertation, University of Zurich, 1921.

42. To borrow an influential formulation from E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983). One example of a history of energy’s social and discursive construction is David Gugerli, Redeströme: Zur Elektrifizierung der Schweiz, 1880–1914 (Zurich: Chronos, 1996).