Engineering ‘natural forces’

The peculiar position of power engineers at the beginning of the twentieth century becomes clearer when seen within a longer tradition of engineering the ‘natural forces’. Over the nineteenth century, research on energy in physics and engineering gradually decoupled. The science of energy, formulated in the first half of the nineteenth century, has its roots in commercial and engineering contexts.Footnote ⁹ By the early twentieth century, however, the concept of energy had turned into a formalized principle of theoretical physics, expressed without any reference to economic or technical perspectives.Footnote ¹⁰ In the technical, economic, and engineering contexts, ‘energy’ was used only in a vague, general sense, or not used at all. Solid, liquid, and gaseous fuels, heat and heating value, pressure, work, and mechanical effect were all meaningful, formalized concepts in these fields, whereas energy was not. In their practical work, it was never ‘energy’ – a pinned-down ‘quantitative permanence’ in all changeFootnote ¹¹ – that was at stake, but specific relations between fuel and heating value, or heat and mechanical effect. Engineers and entrepreneurs did not just apply the physical principles of energy, but tackled entirely different questions: what is the value of a fuel? How can one construct a profitable power system? What is the relation between energy and prosperity? Their concept of energy was embedded in a different set of social, technical, and economic relations.

Engineering – the art of building canals, digging mines, and constructing machines – rose to a state-building profession over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the field comprised civil (construction, canals, and railroads), mining (mines and steel plants), and mechanical (machine-building and maintenance) engineering. Civil and mining engineering were under the control of the state in countries where engineers were part of the state bureaucracy (such as France and Germany). In Great Britain and the US, state involvement was limited to military engineering, and broadened only with geological surveys.Footnote ¹² Mechanical engineering was closer to private industry. It remained outside national engineering schools until the late nineteenth century, when states were already heavily invested in steam power through their navies, railroads, and industries.Footnote ¹³

In the eighteenth century, steam engineering constituted only a small subfield of mechanical engineering, and was restricted to variations of the Newcomen engine, which was mainly applied in mining. James Watt was desperate to find engineers who could handle his improved steam engine, complaining that he had ‘not only to form my own Engines but also my own Engineers’.Footnote ¹⁴ When he began marketing his steam engine in 1775, he offered construction and maintenance for the engines, as well as training for engineers. A couple of years later, he published a little manual entitled Points necessary to be known by a steam engineer.Footnote ¹⁵ Between 1775 and 1825, over a hundred Watt engines were sold abroad, most of them to manufacturing industries, setting off indigenous production of steam engines in some countries.Footnote ¹⁶ As steam engines became more generally applied over the first half of the nineteenth century, regional or national associations of mechanical engineers formed towards the middle of the nineteenth century, developing standardizations and codes of conduct for the use of engines.Footnote ¹⁷

Steam power became the first machine-produced ‘force of nature’, generating a reliable, measurable economic effect, and penetrating production and transport. By 1781, Watt’s steam engine was able to transform the up-and-down movement of the pistons into rotary motion, making it more widely applicable in industry. Sadi Carnot, the first theoretician of the steam engine, heralded it as the ‘universal drive’ (moteur universel). More powerful than animals, and independent of space, unlike windmills and water wheels, the steam engine would ultimately replace them.Footnote ¹⁸ By the second half of the nineteenth century, not only industries, but also navies, shipping companies, and railroads ran on steam power. Steamships, railroads, and the telegraph, the first commercial invention of the electrical age, radically changed the experience of space and time. Transforming travel and communication, they enabled a control of far-away territories, integrated markets, and led to new forms of organization.Footnote ¹⁹ In the nineteenth century, international administrative unions emerged, such as the International Telegraph Union, the Universal Postal Union, and the International Electrotechnical Congress, to negotiate standards for these network technologies.Footnote ²⁰ Owing to their high capital costs, the construction of railroads, telegraphic lines, and electrical systems were closely interwoven with the development of international financing and new forms of corporations.Footnote ²¹

While Welsh steam coal and the Watt engine circulated widely, steam itself was locally produced and consumed. Engines, measurement devices, engineering drawings, calculations, valves, and other parts of engines were also widely traded. This made steam engineering into an undertaking referring everywhere to similar technical objects. Steam is homogeneous; by the mid nineteenth century, its defining characteristics – pressure and temperature – could be precisely determined and (re-)created under given technical conditions. The properties could be related to the mechanical effect yielded, and chemists tried to relate them to the composition of the fuel, too.Footnote ²² Within the scope of fuel, steam, and mechanical effect, the physical and economic potential – ‘energy’ – could be reliably realized. With the emergence of large electrical systems between 1880 and 1920, the scope of this potential broadened considerably.

Electro-technical engineering became institutionalized in schools, universities, and engineering associations in the 1880s. Before the First World War, electrical development meant central stations in urban areas, and self-generation of electricity in industries for lighting and a few electrical motors. Around 1900, the principles of central station management – the relation between capacity, tariff, and load – were codified in talks, articles, and textbooks for electrical engineers.Footnote ²³ During the war, states took control of the power supply, urged industries to connect to the grid, and thus centralized and diversified load.Footnote ²⁴ In the interwar years, the regional or national interconnected system was seen as the most adequate, as it integrated diverse power sources and consumers in such a way that they would complement each other.Footnote ²⁵ Through interconnection, the overall system could become profitable even though single sources or consumers were not. This was a powerful scheme of electrical development, influencing projects around the world, such as the GOELRO plan in the Soviet Union, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Bonneville Power Administration.Footnote ²⁶

Load management lay at the centre of electrical development. As power systems had to balance supply and demand in every moment, they were constructed with a view to the availability of power sources, the capacity of machinery, and the load demand of consumers. To maintain a working and profitable system, the load had to be carefully observed and managed. Load curves circulated in international conferences, and engineers soon developed a sense of typical load curves for certain types of cities, regions, industries, or households. Through load management, power systems recorded the growing part of economic and everyday life that involved the use of electricity. In other words, they acted as an Aufschreibesystem (registration system) for the power economy.Footnote ²⁷ As electricity penetrated more and more areas of life, its consumption could even act as an indicator of productivity and prosperity.Footnote ²⁸ In the power economy, the economic and physical potential was no longer limited to the input and output of a machine, but could be sent through a system, and applied for various purposes.

A book on electricity for the general public published in 1893 predicted:

With electricity, for the first time, a physio-economic effect could be owned, sold, and invested in. Steam was not traded in the steam economy; coal was. Steam was simply a ‘working substance’, serving as a medium between the combustion of fuel and the movement of machinery.Footnote ³⁰ During this process, its property title did not change. As Hugh Quigley summarized in Electrical power and national progress, ‘Coal has still only a potential value.’ A certain weight of coal generated a relatively certain mechanical effect. In contrast to electricity, which penetrates the entire economy, coal’s ‘function begins and ends with combustion’.^{Footnote 31} With electricity, consumers could purchase the economic effect directly as power per time, making them independent from the quality and type of fuel. Electricity as a commodity ‘represented an absolute in itself, incapable of modification or dilution’.^{Footnote 32}

The rise of large-scale power systems enabled the ownership and concentration of the ‘forces of nature’ as a productive factor. This is not to say that central stations, utilities, and grids were necessarily private. In fact, public development of electricity was cherished more broadly in the interwar years. However, this property did account for the specific perspective of the electricity industry, holding an interest in coal and other fuels, water power, and all kinds of applications for electricity. The power industry’s interests covered all its potential suppliers and consumers, which, owing to the modality and flexibility of electricity, meant almost the whole of economic life.

Technocratic internationalism and the foundation of the World Power Conference

By the turn of the twentieth century, state power had become dependent on industrial production and network technologies, and thus on engineers. State-funded research in fields of strategic importance, such as fuels and synthetic materials, was common. Electrification on the communal and regional level had brought electro-technical engineers into contact with political administrations, if not into positions of public service. Engineers entered conventional politics during the First World War in different positions: a number of countries introduced technical attachés in their diplomatic corps, and assigned engineers to allocate scarce resources, or to secure electricity supply.Footnote ³³

In 1921, Stanislav Špaček, a Czech civil engineer, began lobbying for the creation of a World Engineering Federation (WEF), an organization seeking to institutionalize political influence of engineers on an international level. In the twentieth century, van Meer argues, most engineers ‘no longer equated expertise with public service; instead, they viewed their professional interests to be closely aligned with those of the industries that provided them with careers in management and research’.Footnote ³⁴ In her view, there were two conflicting ideas of internationalism at this time. On the one hand, there was a ‘technocratic internationalism’ that sought to ‘reform diplomacy or international relations’. On the other hand, there was a more narrow ‘engineering internationalism’, which was ‘committed to forging international ties for the purpose of building professional solidarity or for sharing engineering knowledge with foreign colleagues’.Footnote ³⁵ Van Meer borrows ‘engineering internationalism’ from Bruce Sinclair’s history of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, where he states that ‘Calvin W. Rice [was] also widely known abroad for his efforts on behalf of engineering internationalism.’ Rice was engaged in the foundation of the WEF, the project of engineering internationalism to which Sinclair presumably refers.Footnote ³⁶ Curiously, van Meer then chooses to associate the WEF with ‘technocratic internationalism’, a term coined by Johan Schot and Vincent Lagendijk.

In 1924, Daniel N. Dunlop, a British electro-technical engineer, assembled the first World Power Conference. The term ‘power’ leaned towards electricity and revealed the WPC’s roots in the electro-technical industry. However, the version in other languages was equally telling. In Romance and Slavic languages, the term was translated as ‘energy’. In German, it became Kraft, which was highly reminiscent of natural philosophy. Both concepts were less associated with electricity and conveyed a more universal meaning.Footnote ³⁷ The association with electricity was one reason why the organization was renamed the World Energy Conference in 1968.Footnote ³⁸

The conference grew out of a techno-internationalist spirit that opposed national politics with a materialist conception of the global economy based on energy. Johan Schot and Vincent Lagendijk hold that the interwar technocratic internationalism combined ‘the myth of networks, an assumed harmony between nation-states, and a preference for a working method which separates technical issues from politics’.Footnote ³⁹ The WPC’s engineers promoted a specific version of technocratic internationalism, which associated the network with an organic economy, harmony between nations that had insight into the energetic principles of economic development, and a technocratic method based on the rational development of power.

Before summoning all ‘practical men, scientists, engineers, manufacturers, financiers and politicians’ to the first WPC in London in 1924, Dunlop had been involved in the foundation of the British Electrical and Allied Manufacturers’ Association in 1911. Given the international entanglements of the industry, the WPC could draw on a network of electro-technical engineers and entrepreneurs, thereby aiming to safeguard the international exchange on which their technologies and business models depended. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, members of the WPC national committees attended both the World Power Conferences and the World Engineering Congresses. Over time, however, the WPC developed into a functioning body with a central office, national committees, a mission, and a constitution, whereas the WEF remained a loosely organized network, and a project with an uncertain future.Footnote ⁴⁰

The decline of the WEF and the rise of the WPC have been related to a change in the self-conception of engineers, but I want to suggest a slightly different reading. The equation of diplomacy with public service, and of engineering solidarity with business interest, falls short of how electro-technical engineers imagined their contribution to interwar international collaboration. It is true that, unlike civil engineers such as Špaček, electro-technical engineers, who were the largest single group in the WPC, had so far mainly been employed by private corporations. However, the actual composition of national committees varied widely, covered many different national engineering traditions, and included other industries, government agencies, and ministries. What is more, the 1920s were precisely the time when electro-technical development itself seemed to point towards more collective forms of organization.

In his foreword to the proceedings of the first WPC, Dunlop opposed a world of prejudice and competition with a world of ‘practical men’ cooperating in a rational way. While he did not rule out that politicians could act rationally, too, this international space of cooperation was clearly epitomized by the work of scientists, engineers, and businessmen:

Dunlop went on to cite Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The sons of Martha’ (1907), a poem dedicated to assiduous and virtuous engineers. Political competition between states had used ‘even the winds and the seas … for purposes of destruction’, so an ‘international morality’ was needed to make sure that the ‘forces of nature’ were harnessed for the benefit of all.Footnote ⁴² Emphatic references to the engineering profession and a certain type of engineer – neutral, rational, visionary, diligent, and ‘always ahead of his time’Footnote ⁴³ – were strong within the WPC. As their knowledge on how to put nature to work was universal, and as it was their duty to keep it working, engineers were the bearers of competent international morality.

This moralized image of the engineer was connected to a vision of economic interdependence and development. Franz zur Nedden, a delegate of the German national committee to the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and president of the Verein deutscher Ingenieure, put the WPC’s mission into a broader perspective by pointing out that ‘engineers and humanity at large seem to wake up gradually to a new and higher form of consciousness, viz., that we are all forming not only communities held together by some static laws, but rather a dynamic organism of collective life of which all individuals and groups are living parts, depending in their existence on each other’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This echoed Dunlop’s claim that ‘The progress of even the most advanced nations is clearly seen to be limited by the conditions of the whole.’Footnote ⁴⁵ The WPC spoke for the ‘global energy economy’ precisely in this sense of the ‘whole’ of which all industries and nations form a part. It routinely referred to itself as ‘the power industry of the world, as represented in the World Power Conference’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The WPC engineers saw themselves as responsible not to a nation, but to an economy, global and material, which was the foundation of all existence. The development of any single national power economy could and should serve the whole. This implied not only the permission, but the responsibility to develop one’s own and other countries, and to put a country’s resources at the disposal of the world economy.

As an alleged servant of this global sphere, the WPC stressed its neutrality. It welcomed all ‘nations of the world’ to form ‘national committees’ and join the organization.Footnote ⁴⁷ After the initial conference in 1924, a central office was set up in London to act as ‘nothing more than a clearing house for the interchange of information on all matters relating to the development of power resources’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As with other international organizations, the national committees inscribed a national structure into a non-governmental, technical organization.Footnote ⁴⁹ Implying the idea of a world economy made up from a number of smaller entities, these committees were intended in principle to be representative of their ‘national power economy’: that is, they were to cover the relevant industries and agencies existing in that country. The actual composition of national committees varied widely. Those of socialist countries often included not a single non-public actor, while other national committees showed little government involvement. National committees chose the delegates whom they wished to send to the International Executive Council, the WPC’s central organ, which met once a year. At that meeting, a chairman and vice-chairmen were elected, while the president was appointed by the national committee organizing the year’s conference.Footnote ⁵⁰

The WPC was funded solely by the national committees. In the beginning, there were no fixed fees but voluntary contributions, which differed vastly. As Wright, Shin, and Trentmann wrote, ‘Geopolitical power was reflected in the WPC through financial influence.’Footnote ⁵¹ Great Britain, the US, and France were by far the major donors. In the first wave of institutionalization and professionalization during the 1930s, a discussion on a more stable basis of funding was opened, and fees ‘based on a quota’, such as population size, were discussed. However, population size would disadvantage poor but densely populated countries, and, with no comparable data on economic power, another basis seemed hard to find.Footnote ⁵² Central office suggested membership fees, with a view to economic power, but without a transparent procedure. Calculation of fees was rationalized only with a wave of applications from newly independent states in the 1950s and 1960s.

The WPC claimed to be neutral in a second sense that distinguished it from earlier non-governmental technical organizations, in that it sought to go beyond any single industry or technology. At the time of its foundation, there were already two international organizations in the field of electro-technical engineering, the IEC, a permanent body that had developed from the earlier International Electrotechnical Congresses in 1906, and the International Council on Large Electric Systems (CIGRE). They were both associated with a certain technology or industry. In contrast, the WPC promised to include all sources and forms of power in its programme. Over the 1920s and 1930s, there were fierce discussions within the organization about the right balance between technical details of single technologies, and about the more general question of the ‘power economy’. Worried that the WPC might be torn apart by the highly specific technical questions discussed at the conferences in the 1920s, Nedden argued for strengthening the second facet of the WEC’s neutrality: ‘It should … be the common aim of engineers, businessmen and statesmen, to co-operate for the best possible combination of all sources and forms of power and power supply rather than expanding in a one-sided fashion the application of any one technical solution for which from any reason any individual group may have predilection.’Footnote ⁵³

In the interwar years, the economic became the common, and allegedly neutral, perspective. The WPC did not represent a given business interest. Instead, it employed a comparative perspective that was already practised in investment decisions, the regulation of industries, and the construction and interconnection of power systems. Decades before departments of energy and the rise of the energy company, this perspective was not clearly located in a certain industry, corporation, or agency.Footnote ⁵⁴ The WPC put an emphasis on questions of accounting, administration, and regulation, which concerned all kind of industries involved in the exploitation, processing, transport, or generation of the ‘forces of nature’. It assembled a public that was interested in these questions, and addressed it by public forms of communication, such as surveys, statistics, models, and indicators.Footnote ⁵⁵

In a specific sense, the experience of large power systems made it easy to believe that technology would reconcile economic interests and the public good. The two principles of electric system development – economies of scale and diversity of load – suggested a trend towards large, centralized systems, in which different loads would mutually enable each other. The well-managed power system harmonized individual economic activities with the stability and efficiency of the overall system. For ‘philosophers’ of power, such as Walther Rathenau, Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii, David Lilienthal, and Hugh Quigley, large power systems served as a model to organize and overcome the contradictions of modern society.

In reality, the perspective put forth by the WPC was not neutral, but productivist. Referring to the nineteenth century, Anson Rabinbach has used the term ‘productivism’ to denote a ‘metaphysic in which the concept of energy, united with matter, was the basis of all reality and the source of all productive power’. This ‘totalizing framework … subordinated all social activities to production, raising the human project of labour to a universal attribute of nature’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In some sense, the interconnected power systems penetrating the economy turned the ‘metaphysics’ of productivism into physics. The productiveness of ‘natural forces’ in industry could now be measured and documented. The new, twentieth-century version of productivism was less preoccupied with single motors than with systems of production. Formalized through electrification, productivist ideology developed into a material economics that was widely shared among engineers, and almost uncontested in both capitalist and socialist countries until well into the second half of the century.

Energo-materialist economics and the calculability of the ‘world power economy’

In the literature on economic statistics and the making of economic knowledge, there is a tendency to view money and the rise of price-based accounting as the taproot of the distinction between the complex reality – economic life – and its representation in a single economic model. ‘It was no longer possible’, writes Timothy Mitchell with regard to diversified production at the turn of the century, ‘to consider material relations to be expressed by one dominant commodity, such as wheat, so economists narrowed the study of wealth to this contentless act of exchange.’Footnote ⁵⁷ In research on economic statistics, abstract quantification is often associated with the calculation of monetary value, and is opposed to the calculation of physical units, such as raw material balances.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, unlike economists, engineers and geographers identified a commodity equalling money in its transformative and universal character: energy. Up to the mid 1950s, there were several attempts to ‘formalize’ descriptions of an economy on the basis of energy. Some version of this ‘energo-materialist’ approach developed in Great Britain, the US, and Germany in the early twentieth century, but nowhere did it assume a political influence comparable to the science of ‘energetics’ in the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁵⁹

Indeed, Dunlop himself had hoped to set up a World Economic Conference instead of a World Power Conference. For him, the ‘world economy’ was an emphatic expression and a humanist project, which was to be pursued against all national politics. However, such a project appeared to be a forlorn hope in the years after the First World War: ‘I could see clearly that it was impossible to bring together politicians, and as all the important economic decisions are in the hands of politicians, it was hopeless to found an international economic body as a first step. But it was possible to bring together human beings in the field of technical questions.’Footnote ⁶⁰ Hence, he set out to do what came closest to his original idea, by creating an organization that would study the natural foundation of all things economic. Questions of power transcended national problems, just as energy spilled over national boundaries.Footnote ⁶¹ Initially, the WPC published a journal called the World Survey, which Dunlop held particularly dear, and which was suspended after his death in 1935. It featured a statistical section on data concerning the ‘power economy’, and focused on general economic questions, ranging from questions of integration in the world economy, and the value of economic statistics, to monetary policy.

Participants of the conferences noted a British interest, but still agreed on a general perspective on the economy. An American magazine surmised that the British initiative had to do with the loss of power of the coal-using countries, who ‘must be alert or they will soon lose their present industrial hegemony’.Footnote ⁶² The Russians were even more suspicious. For Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii, head of the Soviet electrification and planning commission, the WPC was a tool of the capitalist electro-technical industry, which, accelerated by wartime industry, was desperately searching for new markets.Footnote ⁶³ Commenting on the London conference, he reflected that ‘In the near future the centre of gravity of struggle will shift from military to economic conflicts.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Not for a moment did Krzhizhanovskii fall for the peaceable nature of the ‘technocratic internationalism’ championed by the British host, who pictured all nations advancing together by making use of the ‘marvellous resources of nature’.Footnote ⁶⁵ International struggle had not come to a halt, but now ‘expresses itself in the struggle for energetic resources’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The British geographer Halford Mackinder had formulated a similar geopolitical vision twenty years earlier, arguing that ‘a closed political system’ would lead to imperial competition, in terms not of territorial expansion, but of a more efficient use of power.Footnote ⁶⁷

Despite these suspicions, the WPC assembled an international audience sharing the conviction that power had become a fourth factor of production, and that rational planning could make the most efficient use of resources, labour, and mechanical power. The Soviet Union’s embrace of the WPC’s perspective was particularly telling. To Krzhizhanovskii, the rise of planned forms of economic organization was evidence of a general economic development, and as such deserved attention. He saw this as truth in a wrong form: that is, rational organization separated from the struggle to realize a socialist order.Footnote ⁶⁸ In his view, the truth of a single energy economy lurked behind national peculiarities and could be made visible through statistics. While the Soviet Union’s economic state looked poor from the standpoint of energetic indices, rational development of electrification would allow it to catch up.Footnote ⁶⁹

The WPC envisioned itself as a centre of calculation, which surveyed the ‘world power economy’, and collected, standardized, published, and disseminated data on it.Footnote ⁷⁰ The idea to share and collect knowledge was prevalent in Dunlop’s plans from the beginning. From the 1930s, the WPC published a Statistical yearbook (today called the Survey of energy resources). The first conferences manifested the need for common terms and units. In the six years from 1924 to 1930, the WPC organized two major and four sectional conferences. In some sense, these meetings generated confusion and misunderstandings, which the organization then sought to overcome in its concrete statistical and lobbying activities for international standardization. Every one of these conferences swept a wave of resolutions towards the International Executive Council, which was still working without much internal differentiation or formal rules of decision-making. Most of the resolutions were aimed at the exchange of information via statistics or bibliographies, and the international standardization of fuels, testing methods, units, and measures.Footnote ⁷¹ It took the Executive Council until the mid 1930s to work off the resolutions that had accrued over the 1920s.

This construction of a statistical representation of the ‘power economy’ required the harmonization of industries with a very different degree of international standardization, with names and measures serving different functions.Footnote ⁷² The available data on reserves, production, trade, and consumption, as well as their comparability, varied widely across different sources of power. Coal industries had mainly developed locally, and over a longer period of time. The names for different types of coal mirrored their visible and palpable properties, and coal was usually traded by weight or size, not by a numerical scale of quality or performance.Footnote ⁷³ With regard to reserves, the coal industry could draw on a century of geological surveys, whereas petroleum reserves were technically more difficult to survey, and water reserves were hard to calculate mathematically. In contrast, with its dependence on foreign capital and new forms of transnational corporations, the electricity industry had been engaged in standardization of terms and units for four decades.

In line with its self-understanding as an organization spanning many different industries, the WPC refrained from setting international standards itself, apart from the definitions, measures, and units used in its own Statistical yearbook. It also, as early as the 1930s, sought contact with the IEC, the International Association for Testing Materials (IATM, today the ASTM), as well as the International Standard Association (ISA, today the ISO). Franz zur Nedden was particularly active in lobbying for standardization, and he was in personal contact with all three organizations. In 1932, he drafted a memorandum that would clarify the WPC’s role in international standardization and would thus draw a line between the standardizing bodies and the WPC:

In practice, this meant that the WPC would approve and bundle the conference resolutions and forward them to the respective body for international standardization. This was more difficult than it appeared to be, as the division of labour between the IEC, the IATM, and the ISA was not yet clear, and some of the WPC’s resolutions targeted fields that had so far not been part of the work of any of these organizations. The WPC brought together the ISA and the IEC on some matters, including an international definition of the upper and lower heating value.Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1936, it published a Survey of the present organisation of standardisation, national and international, which went beyond standardization in the field of power. The WPC can be seen as mediating between international organizations and national governments, without, however, always keeping the neutrality of a mediator. Through it, certain industries were able to pit national and international actors against each other, either keeping governments from engaging in international standardization, or pushing them to do so.Footnote ⁷⁶ It also approached international bodies to request that they refrain from acting without considering certain ‘competent’ – mostly British or US – views on the matter.Footnote ⁷⁷ In a survey for the UN in the late 1940s, the WPC still named the IEC and the ISA as its most important cooperation partners.Footnote ⁷⁸

In his work on gross national product, Daniel Speich Chassé argues that economic knowledge mediated the perception of global differences, and generated the distinction of a ‘first’, ‘second’, and ‘third world’.Footnote ⁷⁹ While the concept of a world power economy reflected an energo-materialist economics, and resulted from another kind of formalization, it too produced ranks and paths of development. Precisely because of the imagination of a common economic path determined by the use of energy, differences and inequalities within the organization could be justified. After the Second World War, the WPC picked up the distinction between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ (or ‘undeveloped’) countries, and began to frame energy more explicitly as a resource of the ‘world economy’.

Economic reconstruction and energy development politics

After the Second World War, the WPC struggled to regain its pre-war standing and remain the international platform on power – or, as it was now more often called, energy – problems. It became a formal part of the emerging space of international organizations, and some of its members assumed advisory positions in the institutions involved in economic reconstruction. The organization grew quickly, as it came to include many newly independent countries. This led to a profound organizational restructuring in the 1960s. Membership eligibility was formalized, fees became transparent, the organization of conferences and meetings was standardized, and the constitution was amended. Last but not least, the organization was renamed World Energy Conference in 1968. Whereas energo-materialist economics was in decline, a shared interest in ‘energy systems analysis’ emerged in East and West, and oil crises furnished the WEC with a world political mission.

The WPC became formally affiliated with the UN in 1947, when it was granted category-B consultative status to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in 1947. This status was given to those organizations that were of particular interest to the global public, and to certain parts of ECOSOC’s activities.Footnote ⁸⁰ It also meant some UN leverage over membership, as non-governmental organizations could lose their consultative status in case of non-compliance with UN resolutions.

UNESCO was more specifically interested in engineering matters. It cherished engineering as a bridge between pure and applied science for development, and planned ‘to create an institutional structure for international collaboration in the field of engineering’.Footnote ⁸¹ In this context, it also reached out to the World Engineering Conference (formerly the WEF) and the WPC. A UNESCO officer attended the International Technical Congress, organized by the WEF, and identified it as ‘the kind of international organisation that UNESCO will have to depend on for help and support to translate its aims into concrete actions’.Footnote ⁸² The WPC gained consultancy status to UNESCO one year after the WEF, in 1949, and became a part of the Union of International Engineering organizations (UATI) in 1953.Footnote ⁸³ However, contrary to UNESCO’s intentions, the UATI remained a weak coordinating body between international engineering organizations.

The WPC wanted to remain the uncontested international platform where ‘energy problems’ were discussed, and the broad scope of both the WEF and UATI jeopardized this unique position.Footnote ⁸⁴ The main worry was that the WEF and the new network of national engineering associations would, perhaps unintentionally, encroach upon the WPC’s field of activities. The programme of the WEF’s conferences was much broader and dealt with questions of industry as a whole. ‘Now, no industry could exist without constant connection with, and absolute dependence upon, energy problems’, a French delegate pointed out, and ‘one could then ask to what degree the Congress would be successful in avoiding … energy problems which were the proper field of activity of the World Power Conference’.Footnote ⁸⁵ The WPC continued to put forward ‘energy problems’ as a distinct perspective.

After the idea of setting up an International Petroleum Council, alongside the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, had failed, world production and consumption of strategic resources remained unregulated on an international level.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, some institutions organized parts of a market, such as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) from 1951, or the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) from 1960.Footnote ⁸⁷ The WPC served as a platform for delegates of various international and national institutions involved in energy statistics, planning, and development. Its consultative relation to ECOSOC entailed not only the exchange of statistics and other material, but also the invitation of UN officers to give papers at conferences. In turn, as national experts in the field of energy, members of the WPC’s national committees figured prominently in these new institutions. Walker Cisler, a member of the US national committee, was a key adviser to the Marshall Plan. Harold Hartley was president of the WPC, and at the same time chairman of the Commission of Energy set up by the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC). Ion D. Stancescu, former president of the Romanian national committee, came to serve as a special technical adviser to the energy sector at ECOSOC’s Centre for Natural Resources, Energy and Transport, founded in the early 1970s. He constituted an important link between the WEC and ECOSOC throughout the 1970s and advocated for WEC membership in ‘developing’ countries.

Even though the WPC was quick to claim that questions of energy arguably affected every economic activity, it was much more difficult to pin down this ‘economic effect’. With the foundation of the UN, however, the WPC became even less of an authority to actually compile the statistics for a global public interested in questions of energy, although it was a platform where the shortcomings of international statistics were assessed and discussed. At the Conference in 1951 in Vienna, state engineers (such as the socialist glavenergetiki), technical experts from private electric utilities, and delegates from national ministries discussed with officials from the OEEC, the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the ECSC, and the UN Development Program about ‘methods of compilation and use of statistics in the production and utilization of energy’.Footnote ⁸⁸ The result was the same as had been stated by the WPC’s survey on standardization twenty years earlier, in that national and regional comparability of data was satisfying, but international comparability remained a complete mess.

In 1969, Walker Cisler once more proposed setting up an ‘energy information centre’ within the WEC, where comparable data on ‘national power economies’ could be easily accessed from all around the world. The WEC approached the UN, the UNECE, Comecon, the OECD, and the European Economic Community to learn about the scope and time-lag of their statistics. The project was dropped after this survey of existing sources, as the endeavour was determined to be ‘not economically viable’. Instead, the ‘World Energy Conference [was] in a position to take account of the changing requirements [of information] and to make them known to those who have the means of providing the solution’.Footnote ⁸⁹ The national committees could approach their governments and lobby for changes in the statistical methodology, or they could work on converting different units, but these were only superficial fixes. Regarding the UN, the WEC stressed ‘that it should be most willing to discontinue the collection and publication … of data … should the United Nations be willing to collect and publish such statistics substantially on the same lines as [the WEC] has done’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Having published energy statistics from the very beginning, the WEC never achieved the same authority and degree of comparability as the intergovernmental institutions set up after 1945 and during the oil crises.

In the wake of the Second World War, a new membership regime was negotiated, based on participation in the United Nations. Apart from full UN members and a couple of neutral states such as Switzerland, this allowed other countries ‘upon their admission … to the [UN] Specialized Agencies’ to become eligible for membership. This additional clause meant that countries that were not members of the UN but were members of any organization to which ECOSOC had granted the status of ‘specialized agency’ – such as the World Bank, UNESCO, or the International Labour Organization – could become WPC members. This enabled Austria, Italy, and many other countries that joined the UN only in the 1950s to regain their WPC membership in the late 1940s.

Owing to its focus on development, the WPC had always been a uniquely diverse non-governmental, international organization. Compared to other international organizations in the field of technology, its official member base and formal rules were more inclusive. Not more than two of the four most important offices – the chairman and the three vice-chairmen of the International Executive Council – could be held by citizens of the same continent.Footnote ⁹¹ Organizational practice, however, favoured the larger industrial powers and the biggest donors. This inequality can be seen in the locations of the conferences (the first full conference in the Global South only took place in 1983, in Delhi), the persons attending and most vocal in meetings of the Executive Council, and the distribution of papers presented at conferences. With many of the newly independent states joining the WPC in the 1960s, countries that had traditionally dominated the organization sought to safeguard their position and the centrality of their voices at the conferences.

Rarely was the idea of a knowledgeable developed West, and an ignorant underdeveloped rest, made as explicit as in an internal discussion within the German national committee. When the restructuring of the organization was discussed in 1975, it was agreed that ‘The contingent of conference papers has to be reduced considerably for small and mid-sized member countries. This will be easy to be agreed upon, as we do not expect substantial, interesting contributions from the plethora of developing countries.’Footnote ⁹² It was quite obvious who was expected to learn from whom.

In its attempt to rationalize organization in the 1960s and 1970s, the WEC benefited from the statistics issued by other bodies. In 1970, a formula for membership fees based on annual energy consumption was developed. In 1966, of the sixty-one countries, almost two-thirds paid the minimum fee, and only three (Great Britain, the USSR, and the US) the maximum amount.Footnote ⁹³ Just as being a member of the UN meant that GDP was calculated, membership of the WEC came to presuppose quantitative knowledge on the ‘national power economy’. This became possible in the 1960s, when statistical data on energy production and consumption were already gathered on a regular basis by national and international agencies, above all the UN, as stipulated by post-war organizations of economic recovery and Technical Assistance programmes.Footnote ⁹⁴ The conference in Munich, in 1980, for the first time established the exact terms, measures, and units that each paper presented at the conference had to use, bringing a fifty-year-long practice of heteroglossia (and translation) to an end.Footnote ⁹⁵

Energo-materialist economics lingered on after the war, but slowly lost its plausibility and credibility. The Sectional World Power Conference in Belgrade in 1958 was still dedicated to ‘Power as a factor of development of underdeveloped countries’. At that time, the UN had already institutionalized GDP as measure of economic performance and development, leaving the engineers, scientists, and planners at the conference with two different languages of development. Most of them associated monetary accounting with ‘blind’ development, and preferred indicators measuring material change. GDP covered up qualitative changes in industry, on which a theory of material change focused. These changes affected the relationship between economic growth and energy consumption, as energy-intensive industry did not necessarily produce the greatest value.Footnote ⁹⁶ Changing patterns of economic reproduction and development were at the heart of energo-materialist economics. Two Czechoslovakian engineers proposed an indicator to capture these qualitative changes in a ‘ratio of specific energy demand of additional production [to] the basic year production’: that is, a positive number indicating whether the industry was becoming more energy-intensive in comparison to the base year.Footnote ⁹⁷

Under the influence of cybernetics and demand-side economics, the focus shifted from ‘energy’ as an agent of economic change to the analysis of energy as a function in an economic system. Energy balances, a statistical model proposed within the WPC as early as the 1920s, assumed a new meaning. They were no longer ‘estimated’, or aggregated sector by sector, to trace the channelling of energy into productive consumption, as in the Soviet Union, where fuel and power balances had been calculated since 1924. Discussions now centred on energy services, their conversion factors, and relative efficiencies. Energy balances figured prominently at the World Energy Conferences in Vienna in 1957, Moscow in 1968, and Bucharest in 1971. However, to establish clear-cut relations between ‘energies’ would require accounting for their performance in very different technical processes.

The calculation of energy balances made the difference between the physical and economic-technological meaning of energy explicit. One of the most comprehensive studies of a national energy economy before the 1970s was Energy uses and supplies, 1939, 1947, 1965, an assessment of the US energy industry edited by Harold J. Barnett and published by the US Department of the Interior in 1950.Footnote ⁹⁸ Foreshadowing Barnett’s later argument in Scarcity and growth (1960), the study presented the energy sector as a modular system, where single parts could be replaced with others. However, a formally identical input of energy could perform very differently: ‘Energy is a complex abstraction. Despite the attraction of B.t.u. [British thermal unit] conversion factors, B.t.u. are essentially measures of work and not of physical quantity, and the amount of work a fuel performs depends on the function to which it is put and the equipment in which it is used.’Footnote ⁹⁹

The report distinguished between ‘sources of energy’ (coal, petroleum, etc.), ‘energy commodities’ (fuel, electricity, etc.), and ‘uses of energy’ (railroads, manufacturing, households, etc.). Any given quantity of fuel would realize a very different share of its potential according to the use to which it was put: ‘1 B.t.u. of diesel oil performed as much work as 5 B.t.u. of fuel oil in 1947.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As absurd as this might sound, it reflected the inequality of technically mediated energy. ‘The only way to avoid such a dilemma’, states Barnett, ‘is to estimate fuel need only after identifying the function and type of the equipment used.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ In other words, the energy economy had to be approached from the demand side.

The Barnett report was cited at the Vienna conference as further evidence for the shortcomings of energy balances. Setting up a meaningful supply and demand table for energy was more complicated than just gathering data on production. It required a central survey of the entire field, a documentation, systematization, and analysis of the technologies used in the production and consumption of energy, their handling, and their specific efficiencies.Footnote ¹⁰² Only then could conversion factors be calculated that were specific to a certain national energy economy and thus represented the ‘substitutions that actually take place’.Footnote ¹⁰³ This was the view on energy balances conveyed in the pre-1970s conferences. Because such centralized, in-depth studies of national energy sectors were unlikely to happen in a globally concerted way, world balances were seen as misleading or not very meaningful. And yet, only a few years later, the WEC began to work on global energy balances.

A world plan for energy

The beginning of global energy politics is usually located in the 1970s, when a surge in oil prices shocked consumers and policymakers around the world. The so-called oil crisis of the 1970s catapulted the ‘problem of energy’ onto the agenda of international organizations. The conflict with the petroleum-producing countries prompted the formulation of the OECD’s International Energy Program, and the foundation of the International Energy Agency (IEA). The IEA was modelled after previous emergency sharing mechanisms, but went beyond them in allowing low petroleum reserves to be made up for by ‘fuel switching capacity’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This capacity meant any ‘normal oil consumption’ that through government agency ‘may be replaced by other fuels in an emergency’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Even though energy balances had always implied the substitutability of energies, they had mostly been discussed with regard to general conservation or efficiency measures. Now, they were to fulfil a more specific function: the formalization of ‘oil substitution’ on an international level.

Representing both petroleum-producing and petroleum-consuming countries, the WEC did not officially take sides in the conflict but resorted to its role as a clearing house for knowledge on energy. At the World Energy Conference in 1974, Gerald Ford criticized ‘the pulverizing impact of energy price increases on every aspect of the world economy’, and formulated a responsibility of every country to develop and ‘not to misuse’ its resources, to soothe the situation in the world market.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Shifting the responsibility to the oil-producing countries without mentioning the political dimension of the embargo, he was attacked not only by delegates of the OPEC countries.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In the WEC’s International Executive Council, Ford’s opening speech was interpreted as a mission ‘to produce a world plan for energy’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The WEC had already been in discussion with the OECD for some time, which ‘had led to an understanding that they [the OECD] would deal with the problem and its solutions up to 1985, [while] the World Energy Conference had expressed its willingness to take on the task from that point until the year, say, 2020’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The calculation of energy balances assumed a new meaning in this context. The IEA and the WEC promoted them as a statistical innovation that would help countries to realize oil substitution. The WEC argued that ‘Energy statistics, at present collected by governments, were inadequate to pinpoint areas where oil substitution could be realised.’Footnote ¹¹⁰ Therefore, the WEC set up its first permanent commission, the Conservation Commission, to compile a world energy balance. In the 1970s, various institutions – the IEA, the WEC, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis – began to compile energy balances on an international level. To do so, however, conversion factors between different kinds of energy had to apply to all energy economies. As a compromise between a meaningless, abstract conversion factor and the detailed conversion factors of national energy balances, the WEC and the International Union of Producers and Distributors of Electrical Energy agreed to use the relation between fuel and electricity, as calculated in the operation of co-generating plants (1 Joule of electricity equalled 2.6 Joules of fuel).Footnote ¹¹¹ At the level of the nation or the world, the calculation of energy balances no longer required the actual measurement of economic effects in concrete power plants, but merely aggregated data on production and consumption.