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By the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans had come to see the Alps as the ideal place to fashion an alternative to the era's dominant energy source: coal. After 1850, Alpine water increasingly became "white coal": a power source with the revolutionary economic potential of fossil fuel. In this book, Marc Landry shows how dam-building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed the Alps into Europe's "battery"—an energy landscape designed to store and produce electricity for use throughout the Continent. These stores of energy played an important role in supplying the war economies of west-central Europe in both world wars as demand for munitions and other factory production necessitated access to electrical energy and the conservation of coal.
Through historical research conducted in archives across Europe—especially in Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, and Italy—Landry shows how and why Europeans thoroughly transformed the Alps in order to generate hydroelectricity, and explores the effects of its attendant economic and military advantages across the turbulent twentieth century. Landry surveys the environmental and energy changes wrought by dam-building, demonstrating that with global warming, melting glaciers, and calls for a green energy transition, the future of white coal is once again in question in twenty-first-century Europe.
"Marc Landry makes a fascinating case for how technology, geopolitics, and imagination combined to make Europe's modern energy landscape by plumbing and wiring the Alps into giant reservoirs of white coal. It is a story about the surprising interdependencies of coal, hydropower, and ultimately, electricity that has urgent implications for the renewable energy transition ahead." —James Morton Turner, Wellesley College
"Landry's book is an excellent pioneering study. It skillfully combines exemplary and generalizing passages, which also makes it an enjoyable read." —Jon Mathiew, Austrian History Yearbook
"Landry is strongest in detailing the external factors influencing the development of Alpine hydroelectricity (white coal), such as France's loss of coal mines early in World War I and Germany's desire to conserve coal for synthetic fuel during World War II.... Recommended." —T. S. Reynolds, Choice
"Mountain Battery will be of value to scholars in multiple fields, including energy, technology, environmental, and political history. Landry's work adds to the growing body of literature on hydropower development—the interplay of the political and the professional—and its consequences. The research chronicling the bureaucratic and political maneuvers that resulted in Alpine "white coal" is impressive, complementing the many histories of energy development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." —Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted, H-Environment
"It is a mystery that it has taken so long for historians to tell this story, and it is to Landry's credit that he tells it so well." —Nick Ostrum, GlobalEurope
"Mountain Battery is a timely book about a renewable energy that should interest scholars in the energy humanities as well as historians working at the intersection of environmental history, the history of technology, economic history, and the history of foreign policy." —Joseph Bohling, American Historical Review
"It offers a cohesive and convincing interpretation of Alpine hydropower development and, through it, of Europe's energy history. Most importantly, by telling this history at a continental scale, Landry makes it impossible to continue discussing the energy history of the industrial age as an exclusively fossil affair. Mountain Battery deserves, and will undoubtedly get, a wide readership. It's a must-read for energy historians and will also be of great interest to historians of war and the environment, historians of technology, river and water historians, and European historians, environmental or otherwise." —Giacomo Parrinello, Environmental History
"Landry's book convincingly demonstrates the analytical value of integrating environmental and energy history with perspectives from the history of technology" —Robert Groß, Technology and Culture
1. Mountains of White Coal
2. Carrier of Wasted Natural Forces
3. Exploiting Nature's Gifts
4. Emergency Power
5. Between Cooperation and Autarky
6. The Alps and the Energetic Struggle for Existence
7. Completing Europe's Battery
Conclusion