Mountain Battery: The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age
We kindly invite you to the presentation of the book Mountain Battery, which the author Marc Landry will present on June 12 at the Institute of Contemporary History.
When and where: Thursday, June 12, 11.00, Institute for Contemporary History (Privoz 11, Ljubljana)
About the Book
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 the book Mountain Battery, 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.
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.
About the Author
Marc Landry is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Austrian Marshall Plan Center for European Studies at the University of New Orleans. He is also the editor of the Contemporary Austrian Studies series. His research focuses on the environmental history of modern Europe.
