Three ways of thinking about the history of energy

With some tips on fun things to read

John Maynard Keynes observed that ‘practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist’. Karl Marx wrote ‘the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service’.

In short, whether consciously or unconsciously, how we conceptualize the past shapes the kind of futures we can imagine. This is particularly true in energy. When industry insiders, politicians, journalists and commentators discuss how they think the energy system will develop they are usually relying on a particular idea about how worked in the past. In this post I will discuss three ways of thinking about energy history that I have observed over the years. There is nothing incompatible with these frameworks and even historians straddle them.

For each I will offer my thoughts and suggest some further readings that might help you think about energy differently in 2025.

Framework 1: Transitions, ages, waves, leaps and bounds

This framework tends to go with the view that societies around the world are going through an energy transition that will be extremely rapid and ‘techno-economically’ driven.

This is the most common framework amongst those in the energy industry. The past is made up of ‘energy transitions’, where societies have periodically switched from using one type of technology or fuel to another. History is presented as a series of ‘ages’ based on these switch overs – the age of steam, coal, oil, electricity, nuclear, cleantech. Inventors, entrepreneurs and innovators are given pride of place as the motive force behind change. ‘Ages’ overlap with ‘waves of innovation’, as in figure 1 from a lecture by Lord Stern (who wrote a landmark study on climate change and energy in 2006) Transitions are often conceptualized using s-curves, where the diffusion of a technology or fuel is modelled as following a logistic function (slow at first, then rapid, then plateauing). The assumption is that technologies and technology systems are in competition. The economically superior ones eventually displace others. Tellingly, the s-curve was first developed to model the population of fruit flies in a jar before being adapted by the Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti in the 1970s to visualize the global energy system. This conceptualization of history dominates the upper echelons of climate politics. In March 2022 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report used a set of intersecting s-curves to explain how renewables would replace fossil fuels. Another feature of the ‘transitionist’ approach to energy history is representing the mix of fuel types or technologies as a percentage of some total.

Figure 1: The waves of innovation

Source: Stern, Why are we waiting, The logic, urgency and promise of tackling climate change, 2015. here.

Figure 2: Focusing on shares

Source: Malanami, World Energy Database, 2022 – very helpful dataset here.

The energy transition framework is exhaustively covered by Vaclav Smil’s Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects (2010). Another classic is EA Wrigley’s Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (2010). A shorter analytical piece is Roger Fouquet’s ‘Historical energy transitions: speed, prices and system transformation’, 2016 (available here), which shows that past energy transitions are very protracted affairs. The idea of ‘waves of innovation’ goes back to the work of Neo-Schumpeterian economists like Chris Freeman and Carlotta Perez. Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages (2003) is comprehensive. The most interesting version of the Schumpeterian model is Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State (2013) which completely debunks many popular myths about how innovation works. If you are hoping energy will be revolutionized by a technology like the iPhone, Mazzucato’s explains why even the iPhone is a product of the state. For a giggle read The Hydrogen Economy (2002) by Jeremy Rifkin, which shows how it can be foolish to extrapolate from history and argue that another ‘industrial revolution’ is coming.

The problem with this framework is that it falls apart at the seams. Take the idea of fuel-based ages and ‘waves of’ innovation The age of steam is deemed to be synonymous with the industrial revolution, but the first mechanized cotton mills were water powered. Water powered mills persisted until long into the 19^th century and were collocated with coal fired steam engines. Coal was a feedstock for steam, electricity and gas throughout the 20^th century. The age of electricity wasn’t ending in 1920, it was just getting going. The discovery of oil and gas had as profound an impact on electricity as it did motor transportation. Figure 1 is just a picture. The emphasis on percentage share of total energy consumed obscures the persistence of older fuels and technologies. This leads us to framework number two.

Framework 2: Continuity and long-term change

This framework tends to go with the view that the energy transition could happen, but it will probably take longer than many expect unless something changes dramatically (new policies, technologies and economic practices).

In this mental architecture the history of energy is made up of very long-term trends and dynamics that play out over centuries. Over the long run the price of energy services – heat, light, movement – has fallen as societies seek out cheaper fuel and more efficient technologies (see figure 3). In this model, gas lighting, the incandescent lightbulb and LEDs are part of the same long-term trend (see figure 4). The notion that technologies ‘rise and fall’ obscures that at any point in time the energy system was a jumble of new and old technologies entangled in interdependent relationships as much as they were in competition. Wood consumption didn’t evaporate with the rise of coal, it grew, and wooden pit props were used extensively in mines. Energy transitions have occurred, but they take a long time. Most transitions have involved adding new technologies and fuel consumption without replacing the older forms. On a global scale primary energies have grown together and accumulated without replacing each other (see figure 5).

Figure 3: The price of energy and energy services 1700-2008

Source: Foquet, ‘Divergences in Long Run Trends in the Prices of Energy and Energy Services’, 2011.

Figure 4: Price of lighting, 1300-2000

Source: Foquet, ‘Divergences in Long Run Trends in the Prices of Energy and Energy Services’, 2011.

Figure 5: Total consumption globally 1820-2020

Source: Malanami, World Energy Database, 2022 – very helpful dataset here.

Jean Baptiste Fressoz’s More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (2024) is a lucid debunking of the notion that the past is made up of energy transitions. David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (2006) is a very different way of thinking about technology and the persistence of the old. Roger Foquet, ‘Divergences in Long Run Trends in the Prices of Energy and Energy Services’ (2011) (here) contains very cool analysis of the long run trends in energy prices and the price of energy services since 1300.

The problem with this framework is that it can encourage us to think about the future like the past. For example, fixating on primary energy consumption leads to the primary energy fallacy. We don’t have to replace all the oil, natural gas and coal that we burn today because electrification is more efficient. Looking at energy prices, consumption, production over centuries also obscures the disjuncture over shorter periods of time.

Framework 3: Ownership and politics

This framework tends to go with the view that any future energy transition must go hand in hand with a reconfiguration of the politics of energy. For some that means a world of decentralized energy and prosumers. For others it means embracing cooperative, municipal and public ownership.

In this mental architecture the best way to understand the history of energy is to look patterns of power and control. The energy system is of course a physical thing made up of objects. Most books about energy or climate change use this framing, focusing on technologies and commodities. The cast of characters are pylons, pipes, solar panels, electric cars, batteries, oil, gas and electrons. This gives the strange impression that the energy system is a set of relationships between inanimate objects. When in fact it is a set of social relationships between people, organizations, companies, and the state. In recent time it is impossible to understand energy without understanding the companies that control the means of making, moving, and selling energy. The actions of these companies are heavily influenced by rules and regulations defined by the state. Energy is a political industry.

For example, the history of gas and electricity in Britain is comprised of different phases of ownership and industrial structure. In phase one, between 1810 and 1926, the industry was made up of vertically integrated monopolies operating within a particular patch. These localized ‘supply undertakings’ were a mix of privately held and municipally owned. Municipal electricity undertakings were particularly successful and ended up being more effective that their private sector rivals (see here). In phase 2, from 1926, the state intervened to rationalize the energy industry, grouping small organizations and knitting together the electricity system with a new National Grid (constructed in the 1930s). In phase 3, between 1948-1979, energy was nationalized. The electricity and gas systems were dramatically expanded. Infrastructure was built on a massive scale – the ‘SuperGrid’, a new fleet of coal fired plants, nuclear, hydroelectric, liquified natural gas facilities, a natural gas transmission network and much more. It was the apotheosis of the ‘load hungry electricity utility’ that first emerged in the Northeast in the 1910s. Gas and electricity competed vigorously, transforming the fabric of everyday life. From 1986 until today the energy system has operated under a privatized (or ‘liberalized’) model. This had four pillars. Private ownership of assets. Unbundling of generation, networks and supply. Competition between generators and suppliers. Independent regulators (i.e. Ofgem) policing the system. Incentives and regulation have been focused on sweating assets (1990-2010) and decarbonization (since 2010). Over the last 150 years the state has intervened at the start of each phase to reset the rules of the system. These resets were a response to pent up technological and economic forces. Intervention unleashed new dynamics and allowed technologies to flourish in novel and unexpected ways. Nuclear, networks and natural gas conversion went hand in hand with nationalization The dash for gas went hand in hand with privatization.

There are some wonderful books on the political economy of energy. The best history of the modern system is Dieter Helm’s Energy, the State and the Market (2002). Robert Millward’s Private and Public Enterprise in Europe: Energy, Telecommunication s and Transport, 1830-1990 (2005) covers the history of networked energy from the earliest days right through to modern times with incredible depth on both the politics and technology. Thomas Hughes Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (1983) is a classic. Hughes conceptualizes energy as a ‘socio technical system’ and explains how over the early 20^th century regional electricity systems developed an internal logic that drove expansion. For anyone trying to understand whether we are amid a new ‘clean tech’ revolution, Hughes idea that systems only evolve when innovation is focused on the ‘reverse salients’ will be of interest. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital (2016) is a stunning rethinking of the industrial revolution. Sandeep Vaheesan Democracy in Power: A history of Electrification in the United States (2024) is the best book on US electricity history in recent years. Vaheesan recounts the extraordinary story of how rural America was electrified by cooperatives and the federal government. Martin Chick’s Electricity and Energy Policy in Britain, France and the United States (2007) has some wonderful chapters on how the French pioneered marginal pricing in the 1950s, which debunks the notion prices, markets and private ownership are an indivisible trio.