Water powers: the Second World War and the mobilization of hydroelectricity in Canada, the United States, and Germany

Abstract

Comparing three of the major hydroelectric power-producing countries during the war – Canada, the United States, and Germany – this article considers the implications of expanding hydroelectricity for war production and strategy, and how wartime decisions structured the longer-term evolution of large technological systems. Despite different starting points, all three countries pursued similar strategies in attempting to mobilize hydroelectricity for the war effort. The different access to and use of hydro in these states produced a vital economic and ultimately military advantage or disadvantage. The global dimensions of hydroelectric development during the war, moreover, demonstrate that this conflict was a turning point in the history of electrification.

World wars and the age of oil: Exploring directionality in deep energy transitions

“…With regards to World War I, our analysis corroborates work in energy transitions that has interrogated the key role of the conflict in influencing a shift from coal to oil, where war can be seen as an extreme form of ‘creative destruction’ [4] . The present work also chimes with studies of the role of war on energy transitions including hydro-electricity in Canada, the USA, and Germany [2] , [5] , [11] , [12] that highlight the importance of world wars as mobilising forces for energy transitions.…”

“…Matthew Evenden offers a detailed analysis of the ways in which Second World War mobilisation efforts in Canada played a decisive role in accelerating transitions to hydroelectric power under emergency measures to maintain adequate electricity supply to fuel industrial efforts for the Allied campaign [2] , [5] , [11] . More recently, Cohn, Evenden, & Landry conducted a historical analysis of Canadian, German and American mobilisation during the Second World War, and how this conflict played a crucial role in influencing the design of electricity systems in these countries [12] .…”

“…Elsewhere, in the fields of history and geopolitics, there has been significant attention on oil resource geographies, developments in oil technologies, its uses, industry, infrastructures, logistics, and patterns of import and export during wartime [6] , [7] , [8] , [9] , [10] . This paper contributes to emerging literatures on war and energy transitions [3] , [4] , [11] , [12] , [13] , integrating insights from historical and geopolitical literatures with sociotechnical perspectives to understand the role of world war in the 20th century development of the ‘age of oil’ [14] .…”

Waterpower romance: the cultural myth of dying watermills in German hydro-narratives around 1900

“…At the High Rhine and in the Alps, large-scale plants and reservoirs were constructed, substituting hydro for coal and expanding hydropower's role in electricity supply. Similar large-scale facilities arose in the USA, Canada, and European Wasserkraftstaaten (hydro-states) such as Switzerland, Italy, or Scandinavia (Gugerli 1996;Teisch 2001;Parrinello 2018;Cohn et al 2020;Jakobsson 2002;Zimmer 2019). In Upper Bavaria, for example, the power potential between the lakes Kochelsee and Walchensee ( Fig.…”

“…Several historians point out that there is considerable evidence about contemporaries noticing changes in hydropower exploitation as a kind of energy transition (Blackbourn 2013). Historians deepened our understanding of the rise of scientific turbine research (Layton 1992;Malone 2009), the emergence of large-scale hydro-engineering projects (Lagendijk 2016;Cohn et al 2020), and the environmental legacies of exploiting white coal (Landry 2015). Tracing the development in a long-term perspective by analyzing the large-scale view of demand counted in millions of kilowatt-hours displayed by national statistics, it becomes clear that the share of white coal in total energy production from hydropower continued to increase in the early decades of the twentieth century.…”