University of New Orleans history professor Marc Landry’s new book shows how building dams in the 19th and 20th centuries transformed the Alps into Europe’s “battery,” designed to store and produce electricity for use throughout the continent. 

“Mountain Battery: The Alps, Water and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age” is published by the Stanford University Press. The Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies and the Justice Studies program will present a book launch event on Monday, April 14 at 5:30 p.m. in Room 304 of the Earl K. Long Library. Researcher Theo Hilton will moderate a discussion with Landry about the book. 

Landry is an associate professor of history, Marshall Plan Endowed Professor in Austrian Studies, and director of the Austrian Marshall Plan Center for European Studies at UNO.

By the end of the 19th 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 his book, Landry shows how dam-building created an energy landscape designed to store and produce electricity for use across Europe. 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 20th 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 21^st century Europe.