Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
reflected Duke Power's response to “a drought which affected” river flows and thus hydro-
electric production in what his coauthors called the Catawba River valley's “hydro-indus-
trial empire.”
76
The southeastern physiographic environment—which was fossil-fuel poor but rich in re-
newable energy like water—had presented Vance's urban-industrial contemporaries with
limited tools to make the New South bloom and glow. Vance, however, still believed in hy-
dropower ten years after the Southeast's worst drought underscored regional water insecur-
ity. In
Human Geography
, Vance advised TVA technocrats to build one of the nation's only
regional planning experiments, and that they employ large hydroelectric dams as primary
energy generators. But at the same time, New South energy companies had turned to black
coal to generate the majority of their customers' electricity. TVA directors and progressive
engineers, however, had been so clearly influenced by a legacy of New South white coal
projects that they initially embarked on a federally subsidized program that was behind a
technological curve from the beginning. Private energy companies never abandoned their
old hydroelectric facilities or stopped building new ones, but renewable hydro sources in-
creasingly functioned as secondary or peak power sources. Operators could bring hydro fa-
cilities online immediately during moments of high energy demand while capital-intensive
facilities used coal and other fossil fuels at a steady clip to generate primary, or base, loads.
Only after World War II did the TVA once again follow private companies' technological
lead and begin building coal and nuclear plants to keep up with the New South's fast-grow-
ing industrial, commercial, and residential consumer demands.
William Church Whitner, James B. Duke, and Preston Arkwright each understood that
water-generated electricity in the Southeast was, as William S. Murray claimed in 1922, an
The electrical production and distribution grid supported a regional corporate power struc-
ture that was at least as influential as individual states, politicians, planters, and industrial-
ists, and the hydraulic system facilitated the concentration of capital and labor in specific
places. The individual energy companies and their transnational employees did not rule an
exceptional empire, but they did build a remarkable region defined by radial transmission
lines that provided individual companies with a service and product that became indispens-
able in business operations and daily life. In the process, corporate power and technology
wove energy production and water supply into a structure largely invisible to laborers and
consumers who lost sight of the energy and water connection after the 1930s.
Unless there was a problem, early-twentieth-century consumers expressed indifference
toward questions of where their energy and water came from. And professional, service,
and industrial workers took advantage of electric streetcars, elevators in skyscrapers,
tions—artificial reservoirs and urban drought—had reached a point where diminished wa-
