Dam Crazy for White Coal in the New South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 36

Super Power Transmission Network, 1924. In Blue Book of Southern Progress , 1924 ed. (Baltimore: Manu-
facturers' Record, 1924). Courtesy of Conway Data, Inc.
When Atlanta producers and consumers faced this crisis, the interconnected Super Power
transmission network ultimately averted more draconian orders. “To the relief of Georgia
industries,” the state's energy companies imported electricity produced in Alabama and
Tennessee in August 1925. 67 The federal government sold energy generated in the Shef-
field coal-fired steam plant and from the newly operational Wilson Dam (Muscle Shoals)
to the Tennessee Electric and Power Company and the Alabama Power Company, who in
turn transferred the energy—some of which could be classified as “coal by wire”—to Ge-
orgia and the Carolinas. 68 The droughts of the 1920s threatened New South water conser-
vation and consumption plans, but the Super Power grid enabled electricity to move seam-
lessly from one state to another. This technological network linked wet hinterlands and
cores with drier neighbors and thus allowed energy-dependent consumers to avoid thinking
too hard about the energy sources and infrastructure that sustained the modern New South.
The Super Power grid integrated the region but had not integrated the region into the na-
tion, as railroads had done elsewhere and as regionalists like Vance had hoped would hap-
pen. Instead, the Southeast became a new destination for factories and businesses hungry
for cheap natural energy, liberal tax incentives, and tractable human labor. During the 1925
drought, energy companies learned the hard way for the first time that southern rivers, not
unlike mill workers, could, in fact, go on strike.