Book Review: ‘A Question of Power’ Explores Essential Role of Electricity

Some of the things we take most for granted, such as the air and the climate, rest on complex foundations that we often fail to appreciate. The same is true of electricity. In his new book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, energy journalist and scholar Robert Bryce makes a compelling case for the absolute “essentiality” of electricity to modern life and describes the many moving parts of the power sector that produces that electricity. Among the book’s many strengths is the scope it provides for understanding the world’s most capital-intensive economic sector, from the governments and corporations that operate it, to the many individual ratepayers needed to support the system.

In stressing that modern life requires electricity, Bryce contends that the difference between the haves and the have-nots around the globe is defined by whether or not they have it. In other words, electricity provides a proxy for human development. To show how devastating the loss of electricity can be, the book offers examples, ranging from World War II to the Lebanon–Israel war in the 1980s to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017, to show the crippling long-term results from the loss of electricity infrastructure in lost economic productivity, disease, and isolation from global networks.

IW

About the Author

Iddo Wernick

Iddo Wernick is a senior research associate at the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University.

Some of the things we take most for granted, such as the air and the climate, rest on complex foundations that we often fail to appreciate. The same is true of electricity. In his new book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, energy journalist and scholar Robert Bryce makes a compelling case for the absolute “essentiality” of electricity to modern life and describes the many moving parts of the power sector that produces that electricity. Among the book’s many strengths is the scope it provides for understanding the world’s most capital-intensive economic sector, from the governments and corporations that operate it, to the many individual ratepayers needed to support the system.

In stressing that modern life requires electricity, Bryce contends that the difference between the haves and the have-nots around the globe is defined by whether or not they have it. In other words, electricity provides a proxy for human development. To show how devastating the loss of electricity can be, the book offers examples, ranging from World War II to the Lebanon–Israel war in the 1980s to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017, to show the crippling long-term results from the loss of electricity infrastructure in lost economic productivity, disease, and isolation from global networks.