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Organized around eight fundamental ideas, Key concepts in energy history explores the discoveries, technologies and new paradigms in the field of energy, and how they have changed the course of history. Complex technical concepts such as the 'rebound effect', 'technological hybridization', 'marginal cost pricing' are explained in clear terms and a balanced and concise account of t energy sources in the XIX and XX century such as wood, coal, oil, hydroelectricity and nuclear energy is provided. Key concepts in energy considers the process of energy-substitutions and analyzes it as a process of complementary usages, hybridization and technological mixes. The ex-post view tends to focus on replacement from among alternative energy-technologies and is basically innovation-centric. This means that little attention has been given to factors such as the windows of opportunities created by governments, inventors and entrepreneurs. This book highlights how key energy concepts surfaced, tracing their evolution throughout history. It encompasses four economic concepts (rebound effect, energy intensity, marginal cost pricing and levelized cost accounting) and four technological-engineering concepts (primary/final energy, technological hybridization, last gasp and probable oil reserves). The main benefit from reading the book is a cross disciplinary overview of energy fundamentals in a short and focused reading.

A global economic crisis is the most difficult kind of event to predict. This article asks a straightforward question: did anyone come close
to anticipating the oil crisis of 1973/74, which represented a new type of historical sequence? Was the likelihood of an oil shock self-evident at the time? To answer this, I examine the degree of awareness in Europe and the United States of the three possible triggering factors: Egypt's disposition to start a war and enlist the support of oil-producers; the Arab interest in oil conservation and long-term income maximization; and the imbalance in the oil market and the delayed adjustment of oil prices. For each of these topics, I set out both what was expected and what was actually in the offing; the information available to Western analysts and that unknown; the communication noises and the flagrant bias. The conclusion pays tribute to three men – James Akins, Pierre Wack, and Ted Newland – who had guessed what was coming ahead, and explains why their predictions almost succeeded, while others failed.

AbstractDifferences in natural endowments, in geographical conditions and in per capita income set up an historical bifurcation between northern states, with abundant renewable hydrological resources, and less well-endowed southern states. While the first embraced a model of electricity adding, with the embodiment of this form of energy in capital goods and intermediate goods, the second followed a path of electricity substitution, with mixed strategies of replacing inputs in established sectors of industry, public utilities, transport and private consumption. This article examines the different plans for and achievements of economic nationalism in the twentieth century and its consequences, discussing the possibility of reproducing in Portugal the pattern of the stimulus to industrial manufacturing of cheap electricity.

This article examines institution building in the course of the transition to the authoritarian regime of the New State (Estado Novo) in Portugal. The special interest of the Portuguese experience derives from the fact that cartelization and corporatism were combined under the same policy and governed by the same legal framework. The first part of the article reconstructs the historical path from the micro perspective of the introduction of cartelization in the canning industry, which constituted the prototype for future developments in economic policy. Next is emphasized the way the accumulation of spontaneous and discrete individual adjustments of producers to regulation generated a series of unexpected consequences, i.e. consequences that were not in the initial plans of the regulators. The development of 'bureaucratic corporatism' then appears as the historical consequence of the State's overhauling of contradictory policies, its correction of the distortions brought about by economic regulation and the need to preserve ever larger mechanisms for the consultation of interests, without lessening State control.