Electrifying Europe: The Power of Europe in the Construction of Electricity Networks (review)

This excellent book, well-written and thoroughly researched, is based on the author's Eindhoven University of Technology doctoral dissertation, part of the research program of Transnational Infrastructures and the Rise of Contemporary Europe-project (TIE), also based at Eindhoven University. The purpose of TIE is to explore how Europe was shaped by infrastructure projects in the twentieth century. The book fits perfectly with that theme.

Vincent Lagendijk begins with the story of the massive Italian blackout of September 2003, which dramatically highlights the remaining instabilities in the still imperfectly constructed European transmission grid. Several trees falling near the Italian-Swiss border caused Italy to be isolated from the European grid, which destabilized the domestic system and led to the immediate collapse of the entire Italian power system and the largest blackout in Italian history. A final report on the incident by the Union for Coordination of Transportation of Electricity, a network run cooperatively by twenty-three European transmission system operators, blamed both national and European policies and developments for the failure. The transmission system was unable to handle the large cross-border flows of electricity, in part stimulated by European market liberalization.

Lagendijk examines in detail the developments leading to this still imperfect system. His focus is on the international organizations and engineering communities in the planning and building of the European electricity network, a process he calls "hidden integration" (p. 30). He emphasizes that the "system builders" were not always successful, primarily because national politics often trumped best engineering practice.

Even with dramatic technological developments in transmission in the first two decades of the twentieth century, most international exchange of electric power took place only where plants were located on rivers forming international borders. There was no European system, even though German, Swiss, Belgian, and French holding companies owned utilities in more than one European country, as well as overseas. These holding companies truly were multinational, but national jealousies (seeking to keep precious electricity from being exported) stood in the way of network development. Lagendijk effectively documents changing attitudes in the 1920s as international organizations—the formation of which often was stimulated by engineers—were created to deal with industry issues, including interconnection. One of the most prominent of these organizations was the World Power Conference, formed in 1924, which met periodically to discuss and publish papers on various issues.

Over time, the idea of a European electricity network began to be discussed vigorously. A number of engineers saw network technologies as a potential unifying force, both political and economic. In 1929 French engineer Georges Viel presented a plan for a high-voltage transmission grid spanning Europe. Two holding-company engineer-executives, Oskar Oliven of Gesellschaft für elektrische Unternehmungen (Gesfürel) and the American born Dannie Heineman of Société Financière de Transports et d'Entreprises Industrielles (Sofina), presented a dramatic plan for a European super power system. None of these plans came to fruition, either because of political opposition or the opposition of other engineers who believed the plans to be too big and cumbersome. These engineers argued for starting on a smaller scale.

Depression and war disrupted any grand plans and, in the aftermath of World War II, European electrical systems were organized into three blocks, Western Europe, Scandinavia, and Central and Eastern Europe. Nearly every plan for integration foundered on national opposition: Lagendijk discusses the difficulties of coordinating engineering plans with political and economic realities. Gradually, beginning in the 1950s and lasting to the present, the idea of a European power pool took hold, not through a bold infrastructure investment plan, but on a case-by-case basis. After the mid- 1980s, even East and West began to interconnect systems. Lagendijk shows that by 2003 an extensive integrated European network existed but laments that national competitiveness, a function of liberalization policies, still allowed selfish operation of the system; hence the Italian disaster. The dream of the engineers of the 1920s...