Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes Alaskan electrification between 1893-2023 to push the methodological boundaries of energy history. Alaska electrification was mediated by the dynamics of internal colonialism, resource extraction, circumpolar militarism, public power and bootstrap innovation.

Paper long abstract:

Too often environmental histories of energy utilize methodologies that marginalize peripheral areas or attempt to impose concepts that poorly explain areas far from the metropole. This paper uses the example of Alaskan electrification, 1893-2023, to push the methodological and conceptual boundaries of energy history via two primary interventions. First, electrification must be understood not simply as historical change over time but also change across space. Alaska’s electric history demonstrates that concepts like the “global north/ south” neglect the tremendous inequality and internal colonialization within northern polities. This study utilizes insights from geography and area studies to understand electrification as a process of uneven and unequal development. This paper argues that Alaska electrification was mediated by the dynamics of internal colonialism (including resource extraction and circumpolar militarism), public power, and bootstrap innovation. Second, if the concept of energy regimes has illuminated key system dynamics, it has simultaneously occluded much. Alaska exhibited tremendous variance between rural and urban areas, complicating any conception of a totalizing energy regime. Furthermore, small scale but important innovations produced meaningful efficiency gains, despite not creating a fundamental energy transition. Ironically, rural and under-resourced areas most often made the most important electrical breakthroughs. Rather than the standard story of rural development and state building, these interventions recast Alaskan electrification as an instructive example of what I call “depetrolization”— an attempt to reduce petroleum utilization via efficiency and hybrid (wind and hydro) generation—that can inspire contemporary responses to the climate crisis in a hard to decarbonize region.