Mountain Battery

The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age

By: Marc Landry

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Hardcover | 21 January 2025

At a Glance

Hardcover
277 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.5 x 15.88 x 2.54

Hardcover

$359.99

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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 expanding the war economies of Austria-Hungary, France, Italy, and Germany as demand for munitions and other factory production necessitated access to electrical energy.

Through historical research conducted in archives across Europe, especially in Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, and Italy, Landry analyzes government and corporate documents, conference proceedings, trade journals, and private holdings to show how and why Europeans thoroughly transformed the Alps in order to generate hydroelectricity, and 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.

Industry Reviews

"Mountain Battery is a must read for energy historians. Telling a deeply transnational story, Marc Landry illustrates how the vision of a hydraulically powered Europe was used both to bring countries together and to advance the ambitions of economic autarchy and militarization." -Stephen Gross, New York University "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

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