Hydro Power, Energy Transitions, and the Onset of Canada’s Great Acceleration

Daniel Macfarlane

This is the second post in a series exploring the potential of the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with Active History.

If the Great Acceleration – the dramatic increase in human activity and the resulting impact on the Earth’s natural systems since the mid-20th century – is a valid framework, then surely Canada helped set the pace.¹ After all, Canada emerged as a major producer of fossil fuels during the Cold War and has earned the moniker of climate villain with one of the highest per-capita emissions in the world.

The start of the Great Acceleration (GA) is generally held to be about the midpoint of the twentieth century (for many, the GA is intertwined, even synonymous, with the Anthropocene). That the 1947 Leduc oil strike, marking Canada’s ascent as a major oil-producing nation, occurred at this time seems to solidify the applicability of the Great Acceleration frame.

But Canada was an energy superpower long before fossil fuels became one of the country’s major exports. And that was in the realm of hydroelectricity. Electricity has proven to be the foundational driver of modernity (and also of both the GA and the Anthropocene). To illustrate, while fossil fuels are deeply embedded in the consumption patterns of most Canadians, I can imagine my life free of hydrocarbons much more easily than I can imagine it devoid of electricity.

If indeed electricity is even more necessary for modern lifestyles than fossil fuels, might the inception of Canada’s Great Acceleration be tied to the country’s growth of hydroelectricity? If so, then the start of the GA, at least in the Canadian context, can be located in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Energy Transitions?

To make this case, I’d like to begin by invoking Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s 2025 book More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy.² Fressoz takes issue with the “energy transition” concept, largely attributing its origins to western twentieth century academics, scientists, and institutions – including atomic power advocates, fossil fuel companies, and the International Panel on Climate Change. Adopting a global perspective, the author contends that primary energy types in the modern period have actually been symbiotic and cumulative, but this has been obscured by the tendency to focus on relative over absolute use.

Thus, we speak of the historical replacement of wood and coal by oil and gas, for example. Except that, as Fressoz stresses, coal and wood use continued to go up after they were supposedly replaced, even if their percentage of the energy mix shrank. In fact, more total coal and wood are being burned and used today than ever before in human history.

Consequently, flawed beliefs about the timing and duration of historical energy transitions underpin present attempts to decarbonize. That is, environmental historians, political ecologists, and other academics have, according to the book, reified this supposed past pattern of energy transitions into the basis for our contemporary approach to a transition away from fossil fuels.

Yet Fressoz avers that this energy transition theory reflects the “ideology of capital in the twenty-first century”³ since it justifies our current too-slow approach to climate mitigation, fostering the belief that we can wait for unproven technological solutions rather than making far-reaching political and economic transformations now. Following this line of thinking, even if we do dramatically increase our sources of renewable energy, we are likely to just keep using even more fossil fuels on top of that.

Canada’s Great Acceleration

 So, what does this all mean for Canada’s Great Acceleration? The cumulative and symbiotic use of energy forms can certainly be read as supporting the GA. Even as Canada become a petro state and a nuclear state, it remained a hydro state; that is, the rise of Canadian oil and reactors didn’t lead to a decline in hydroelectricity nor coal.

Indeed, by several metrics the peak of Canadian coal use occurred near the end of the twentieth century (since then natural gas usage in the country has increased, often in place of coal). And Canada has continued to build larger and larger hydroelectric dams.

Global hydropower installed capacity growth since 1900. https://www.hydropower.org/blog/blog-hydropower-growth-and-development-through-the-decades

If we look at the charts and graphs marshalled in support of the Great Acceleration, some noticeable upswings began before the Second World War, especially in North America. Economist Robert Gordon has argued that, at least in the U.S. context, the post-1945 age was not the period when the majority of the “acceleration” took place, but rather the era when it reached its top-end speed.⁴

For Gordon, it was actually the first four decades of the twentieth century that were the most revolutionary period of concentrated expansion in human history, characterized by inventions that could “only happen once”. By 1940, most American homes were “networked” and had electricity, heating, running water and sewers, telephones, etc.

Given Canadian proximity and connections to the U.S., one might surmise that the American situation also applied to its northern neighbour. Apart from a handful of  larger urban areas, however, Canadians remained reliant on power derived from the organic energy regime for residential use until about the middle the twentieth century.⁵ Though electricity in homes wasn’t as common in Canada as in the U.S. before the onset of the Second World War, that energy form was nonetheless more widespread within Canada than in almost any other country around the world.

Electricity

Starting in the 1880s, some of the world’s first hydroelectric stations were opened in Canada. Since the birth of hydropower, Canada has been one of the globe’s preeminent developers of this energy type both in gross, relative, and technological terms. It was among the earliest to feature the central station model, several of the world’s largest hydroelectric stations were erected in Canada, and the first ever crossborder power line traversed the Niagara River.

Canada’s installed hydro capacity went from 1,011,000 horsepower (hp) in 1910 to 1,754,100 hp in 1920 – at which point hydroelectricity was responsible for 97% of the nation’s electricity, compared to 20% in the U.S. – and then 5,114,100 hp by 1930.⁶ As of that year, Canada and the U.S. led the globe in hydropower, together accounting for about half of global capacity (see Figure 2 – note that this graph represents the year 1930). 

Leading installers of hydropower capacity, 1898-2023.. https://visualizingenergy.org/what-countries-have-the-greatest-hydropower-capacity/

Electricity is a major driver of the Great Acceleration. Until recently, the majority of it worldwide was derived from fossil fuels (aside from Canada and a few other countries). But more critically, electricity indirectly enables so much of our consumption of resources and so many of our environmental impacts. Plus, nuclear fission, another key energetic aspect of the Great Acceleration, has been primarily used to generate electricity.

Thus, there is a strong case to be made, based on its hydroelectric history, that the Great Acceleration commenced before the Second World War in Canada (and in the United States). If so, the opening of Ontario Hydro’s Queenston-Chippewa (later renamed Beck No. 1) power station at Niagara Falls, the world’s largest when it came online in 1922, might serve as a “golden spike” of sorts.

Conclusion

Electrifying everything and developing “green” power – solar and wind especially – might be the closest thing humanity has to a technological silver bullet in the face of the climate change threat (see Mark Jacobson’s Still No Miracles Needed and Saul Griffiths’s Electrify). Granted, because of the ecological and social impacts of dams and reservoirs, I doubt we should be building new hydroelectric facilities, but that is a different topic for another day. 

Fressoz’s More and More and More doesn’t sufficiently stress the fact that what might separate historical energy transitions from today’s decarbonization efforts is that we have a strong moral and scientific imperative to make the switch (of course, the vested interests opposed to decarbonization are likely stronger than the adversaries of previous transitions). The book has other weaknesses too, including Fressoz’s presentation of a straw man argument about energy historiography and his overstating of the novelty of its arguments.

Nevertheless, Fressoz’s arguments about the patterns of past energy transitions are valuable. And running like a thread – or maybe a transmission line would be more apt – through the changes of this century and the previous one is electricity. As such, Canada’s hydroelectric history suggests that we may want to reconceptualize the starting point of this specific country’s Great Acceleration.

Daniel Macfarlane is a Professor in the School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. He is an editor for The Otter-La loutre and is part of the NiCHE executive. A transnational environmental historian who focuses on Canadian-American border waters and energy issues, particularly in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin, Daniel is the author or co-editor of six books on topics such as the St. Lawrence Seaway, border waters, IJC, and Niagara Falls. His book “Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations” was published in summer 2023. His newest book is “The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History” (September 2024). He is now working on a book about Lake Michigan, co-editing a book on the St. Clair River/Delta/Lake, and is planning to eventually write a book on the environmental history of the Great Lakes. Website: https://danielmacfarlane.wordpress.com

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1. John R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History Since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
2. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2025).
3. Fressoz, 220.
4.  Robert Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 122-128.
5. Richard W. Unger and Thistle, Energy Consumption in Canada in the 19th and 20th Centuries: A Statistical Outline (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Instituto di Studi sulle Società del Mediterraneo, 2013).
6.  Historical Statistics of Canada, 1st ed, Series P1-6, 2nd ed. Series Q81-4; table also found in Armstrong and Nelles, Wilderness and Waterpower, 4.