Heat, Power, and Light: Revolutions in Energy Services (review)
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Roger Fouquet’s Heat, Power, and Light marshals an impressive array of data to reveal long-term price and energy-consumption trends in Britain for domestic, public, and industrial uses, with consideration given also to the changing efficiency rates of energy technologies. The data-sets cover time spans from 50 up to 1,000 years. A major strength of Fouquet’s study is the [End Page 699] way in which it combines scientific, technological, market, and consumption variables to develop a rich, long-term statistical portrait of key energy “consumption junctions”—the points where supply and use interact. For example, one graph traces consumer energy spending, as a percentage of GDP, for three sectors between 1500 and 2000: lighting, domestic heating, and passenger transport. A related graph traces overall consumption in each of these areas over the same time span. This treasure trove of data is a valuable resource for economic, technological, and social historians as well as for policymakers.
The core of the book is organized around a historical section and an analytical section. The historical section includes chapters on heating, stationary power, transport, and lighting, wherein key time-series data are presented, discussed, situated historically, and then combined to reveal broader, longer-term trends. For example, the chapter on lighting provides consumption, price, and efficiency data for tallow candlelight, whale-oil light, and gas, kerosene, and electric light. The data series are then merged to show the evolution of average lighting efficiency, price, and consumption rates from 1500 to the present. The historical chapters also include discussions of the underlying technologies and statistics on important external variables shaping energy use, such as the effect of heating on average air temperatures in Britain since the mid-seventeenth century.
The analytical section integrates and reworks the data from the historical chapters to establish more general trends and comparative indexes for energy prices, consumption, and energy-efficiency levels over long periods, generally since 1500. One chapter also examines external costs (specifically pollution costs) linked to energy technologies. There is a chart that traces the monetary external cost per fuel unit for coal-burning fireplace heating between 1500 and 1800. When combined with the direct price per fuel unit for coal heating, the total cost for this technology over time can be estimated. Fouquet acknowledges the many uncertainties in the data-sets: a fifty-page appendix presents the raw numbers and details the sources for and limitations of each of the foundational time series. I think most readers will agree, however, that the limitations do not outweigh the overall value of establishing, correlating, and unifying such a large and diverse body of energy-related statistics.
Those who have followed the burgeoning literature on “peak oil” and nonrenewable resource depletion may take issue with the short shrift Fouquet gives to these issues. The last section of the book includes chapters on “Future Trends in Energy Services” and “Policy Discussion Related to Long-Run Energy Services,” suggesting that Britain’s energy future will not deviate radically from its energy past. One chart forecasts energy price and consumption data up to 2050, based on the assumption of an annual GDP per-capita increase of 2.5 percent and an annual decrease of energy service prices between 1.5 and 4.5 percent. The discussion that follows acknowledges [End Page 700] the existence of more pessimistic scenarios, but largely dismisses them; Fouquet writes that “the on-going debate about whether the global economy is likely to ‘run out’ of fossil fuels does not seem to be constructive” (p. 351).
In fact, peak-oil theory is not about “running out” of fossil fuels, but rather about statistical and qualitative methods for determining overall reserves and about the transformations that must occur once the halfway point of nonrenewable fossil-fuel supply is reached. Fouquet’s bibliography, nearly twenty pages in length, does not include any of the major texts of the peak-oil literature such as the work of Colin Campbell and...
