Smil on Fouquet, _Heat, Power and Light: Revolutions in Energy Services_

[Book Reviews in Economic and Business History]

Published by EH.NET (December 2008)

Roger Fouquet, _Heat, Power and Light: Revolutions in Energy Services_. 
Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2008. xii + 470 pp. $160 (hardcover), 
ISBN: 978-1-84542-660-6.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Vaclav Smil, Faculty of Environment, University 
of Manitoba.


Societies use many forms of energy (biomass and fossil fuels, 
electricity generated by burning fuels or by harnessing water, wind, the 
Earth’s heat and solar radiation or by fissioning uranium) to provide 
individuals, households, cities and economies with essential energy 
services whose principal categories include domestic heat, lighting, 
industrial (overwhelmingly stationary) power, and freight and passenger 
transport. Provision of all of these services has undergone major 
changes with both gradual and abrupt shifts to new energy sources 
(energy transitions from wood and charcoal to coal to hydrocarbons to a 
higher share of primary energies consumed in a secondary form as 
electricity) and to new fuel and electricity converters (better stoves, 
lamps, furnaces and boilers, new engines and turbines and new electrical 
lights and appliances). Technical innovation, the emergence of mass 
energy markets and a steadily rising demand for energy services were the 
driving factors behind these changes and their beneficiaries through 
numerous reinforcing feedbacks.

In the long run, prices of energy services have shown some very 
impressive declines (in some cases by orders of magnitude), their per 
capita consumption has increased to such an extent that some rates could 
be seen as going beyond what might be considered as rational saturation 
levels -- and these developments have taken place even as many 
previously highly damaging externalities that accompanied the supply of 
essential energy services have been either completely eliminated or 
reduced to much more acceptable levels thanks to the their 
internalization (through effective controls) or to the deployment of 
better techniques.

This, in two short paragraphs, is the story (and the history) of energy 
uses whose basic qualitative outlines have been recognized for decades 
by generations of engineers, historians and economists interested in 
long-term energy developments. Fouquet’s welcome contribution to this 
genre is to take this basic narrative and to quantify the use of basic 
energy services -- as best as possible and as far back as possible -- 
based on what is certainly one of the best available national data 
stores derived from a wide variety of English historical and modern 
statistics and case studies. The advantage of the choice is obvious, as 
few countries can provide such data series as the cost of candles or 
fuel wood going back to the late Middle Ages and as the country’s 
post-1700 industrial development has been accompanied by an uncommon 
interests in quantifying its progress (be it the price of coal and coal 
gas or the performance of engines or lights).

In the trio of introductory chapters Fouquet looks first briefly at the 
past, present and future of energy services, and at energy demand, 
technical change and economic development and then he describes the 
historical data and methods he has chosen to use. The book’s most 
substantial part deals with the development of individual energy 
services with separate chapters for heating, stationary (industrial) 
power, transport and lighting: in most cases the time span under 
consideration is 1300-2000. The third part analyzes long-term trends in 
the production, consumption and costs of these services (including their 
externalities) across the same time span, and some of the policies that 
have influenced those trends. The closing trio of very short chapters 
speculates about future trends and policies that may yield “sustainable” 
futures (I am allergic to that always ill-defined, and hence largely 
meaningless, term: hence my quote marks).

Fouquet has dug widely and deeply into English sources, publications, 
statistical reconstructions and the best available data sets. Having 
such long-run quantitative perspectives under one cover is both very 
useful and quite revealing. Having it analyzed in consistent terms (as 
changes in per capita use, prices, conversion efficiency and energy 
intensity) makes it, of course, even more valuable. There is only one 
facet of the work that, in my view, subtracts from its great value. 
Fouquet is an economist and economists are ever ready to resort to 
models where real numbers are lacking. And so besides many inevitable 
data interpolations (some spanning real time chasms) and questionable 
assumption (did London market represent the entire country?) he has also 
modeled the missing realities in order to produce simulated estimates 
for energy uses, efficiencies and prices for every tenth year between 
1300 and 1850 and for every year between 1850 and 2000.

Not only that, he has chosen to append the results of his modeling 
exercises not in appropriately (that would be grossly) rounded numbers 
but in risible details, and, to compound the difficulties of long-term 
comparisons, to express all figures in constant £(2000) and to compare 
energies in terms of oil equivalent. And so we can find that in 1310 
lighting by candles cost £3,652 per tonne of oil equivalent, that the 
average efficiency of heating in 1650 was 11.9%, or that land freight in 
1760 was £ 339/tonne-kilometer. Of course, Fouquet knows that such 
“estimates are certainly not accurate” but he maintains that “they 
provide the correct order of magnitude” (p. 314). This begs the question 
why the book contains dozens of graphs based on plotting these 
inaccurate estimates and showing their misleadingly precise decadal and 
annual ups and downs across (as the case may be) seven, five or three 
centuries.

If the order of magnitude is all we can rightly get from nearly all 
pre-1750 data, then why not show their most likely centennial values 
with some error bars rather than offering numbers down to a pound and a 
decimal point? Does the author admonish us in his preface to “consume 
the graphs in moderation” because he is all too aware of their inherent 
weakness? There are also many questionable point estimates. Can we 
really seriously propose (p. 393) that the heating efficiency of a 
traditional fireplace was 9.5% in 1500? Was the economic cost of 
Britain’s air pollution (p. 304) really equal to nearly 20% of the 
country’s GDP in 1900? On the other hand (p. 407), “evidence of the 
declining cost of travelling by plane was not found.” Checking the price 
of BOAC’s London-New York economy ticket in 1950 and comparing it with 
the price charged by Virgin Atlantic in 2000 would have done the trick.

Fouquet has produced an outstanding contribution to our long-run 
understanding of energy uses. If he could have resisted modeling the 
distant past and let the unruly realities speak for themselves, the 
result would have been even better.


Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Environment, 
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. His latest books are _Oil: A 
Beginner’s Guide_ and _Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next 50 
Years_ (both in 2008).

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