By the end of the nineteenth century\, Eur opeans had come to see the Alps as the ideal place to fashion an alternati ve to the era's dominant energy source: coal. After 1850\, Alpine water in creasingly became "white coal": a power source with the revolutionary econ omic potential of fossil fuel. In Mountain Battery: The Alps\, Water\, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age\, Marc Landry shows how dam-buildin g in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed the Alps into Euro pe's "battery"&mdash\;an energy landscape designed to store and produce el ectricity 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 nece ssitated access to electrical energy and the conservation of coal.
\nThrough historical research conducted in archives across Europe&mdash\;es pecially in Germany\, Austria\, France\, Switzerland\, and Italy&mdash\;La ndry shows how and why Europeans thoroughly transformed the Alps in order to generate hydroelectricity\, and explores the effects of its attendant e conomic and military advantages across the turbulent twentieth century. La ndry surveys the environmental and energy changes wrought by dam-building\ , demonstrating that with global warming\, melting glaciers\, and calls fo r a green energy transition\, the future of white coal is once again in qu estion in twenty-first-century Europe.
\nMarc Landry \;is Assist ant Professor of History and Director of the Austrian Marshall Plan Center for European Studies at the University of New Orleans.
\nSponso red by Friends of Hubbell Library
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