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This thesis employs twentieth-century hydroelectric development ventures in the Highlands of Scotland as a means of exploring conflicting demands of socio-economic development and landscape protection in cherished places. In Scotland, twentieth-century landscape protection ideals were founded upon a landscape aesthetic shaped by the principles and objectives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism. The concept that the ‘natural’ world somehow existed separately from the world of humans, as a potential refuge from a rapidly industrialising European society, meant that the Romantic landscape aesthetic left little or no room for the incorporation of visible elements of industrialisation. This aesthetic has seen only limited change over time. As a result, satisfactory compromises between land-use and landscape protection have seldom been reached: a situation thrown into sharp relief by efforts to develop Highland water systems for the generation of hydroelectric energy during the period 1919 to 1980. The debate over hydroelectric development in the Highlands is instructive for a number of reasons, not least its parallels with the current focus on the placement of wind turbines in significant landscapes. Thanks to the Romantic legacy, attempts to modify landscapes as valued as those of the Highlands are fraught with complexity, even when development is undertaken in the interests of socio-economic enhancement. The thesis outlines the progression of both sides of the argument, assesses the significance of the compromises attempted and evaluates the lessons learned from nearly six decades of policymaking initiatives in this sphere. Core aesthetic ideals broadened, but did not change. Landscape protection progressed on the basis of protectionists’ ability to adjust the focus of their opposition; increased articulation of the idea of the collective ownership of important landscapes superseded the need to confront the viability of entrenched aesthetic orthodoxies.

Climate change has obligated countries worldwide to transform from centralised fossil fuel generation to decentralised renewable generation. However, renewable energy generation is typically weather dependent, and thus fluctuates significantly, making it an unreliable base load energy supply. Moreover, various socio-cultural, political, economic, technical, and institutional challenges are impediments to a seamless transition towards a renewable energy future. Finding and implementing cost-effective renewable energy solutions that provide reliable power while addressing community concerns and environmental impacts is challenging. Over time, various electrical, mechanical, thermal, and chemical energy storage technologies have been introduced to store electricity. Of these storage technologies, the pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) system appears to be one of the most mature and reliable energy storage systems (ESS) currently in the market. PHES technology has been in existence since the 1890s. Recently, the number of large-scale PHES system installations worldwide has accelerated due to the increasing demand for large-scale energy storages to support the exponential growth in intermittent renewable energy system deployments. Various challenges impeded the development of pumped hydro technologies. The first challenge to their development is the availability of a suitable topography, followed by other social, environmental, and economic challenges. Researchers worldwide have dedicated their efforts to devising diverse approaches to tackle these challenges effectively. However, they have not yet been effectively addressed. Thus, this study endeavoured to develop a GIS (Geographic Information System)-based multi-method PHES site selection decision support framework and associated tool capable of comprehensively assessing the suitability of PHES site options. The goal of the GIS based tool was to accelerate the pre-feasibility assessment process by semi-autonomously narrowing down the number of viable PHES sites based on various technical, environmental, social, and economic criteria. This PhD study firstly identified the knowledge gaps and synthesised the drivers and barriers to the development of PHES from the academic literature. These factors were then validated for the Australian context through consultation with experts. Subsequently, the conceptual framework of the study was established. The site selection procedure was carried out in two phases, where experts were engaged in the entire process. First, the techno-environmental investigation was conducted utilizing GIS spatial data (e.g., land elevations, proximity to infrastructure, etc.) to populate an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) structured model to assess the various criteria. Second, a socio-economic investigation of the predetermined PHES sites was conducted utilizing GIS and Bayesian Networks (BN). The multi-method PHES site selection decision support tool was applied to identify sites in Northern Queensland (i.e., case study area). Finally, shortlisted sites were examined for financial viability using a Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE) assessment for a number of realistic operation and utilization scenarios. As a result, this study retrieved various drivers for, and barriers to, the development of PHES. The study ranked the significance of reported drivers and barriers and the lessons learned for both developed and developing countries. The GIS-AHP techno-environmental investigation demonstrated for the case of Northern Queensland, Australia, revealed that at least fourteen PHES sites could be developed across the region. Whereas the application of the spatial-BN model reduced the suitable PHES sites to nine that are suitable from a socio-economic perspective. These nine sites could store and generate over 323 TWh of electricity over their life expectancy at a levelised cost of 0.04-0.274 AU$/kWh. The various assessment modules have been compiled into a GIS-based multi-method decision support tool for PHES sites selection. Overall, this research has contributed to the existing body of knowledge by effectively proposing a decision-making framework and tool that can be used to rapidly narrow down the ideal sites for PHES development in any geographical domain. The developed spatial-BN approach provides a novel approach to not only resolve socio-economic/techno-environmental PHES site selection decisions, but also has wide applicability to various other GIS-based site selection problems. The developed approaches described in this PhD study have implications for researchers, energy planners, and other practitioners seeking to locate feasible sites for the renewable energy resources required for transitioning to a zero-emissions economy.

This project explores the shared history of the Stanislaus River canyon and the Emigrant Wilderness, two places in the mountains of central California that changed the way Americans manage the country’s preserved wilderness. In both places, the environmental conditions that made them popular destinations for outdoor recreation – and, in turn, made them subjects of wilderness preservation campaigns – existed thanks to human artifice and engineering. And in both cases, that engineered infrastructure was connected to a single hydroelectric project in the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountains completed shortly after the turn of the 20th Century. With predictable and controlled water flows, the stretch of canyon downstream from the project’s main power plant became in the 1970s the most popular rafting whitewater in the American West and remains today a national symbol for river preservation. Fifty years prior, the Emigrant Wilderness became a backcountry fisherman’s paradise thanks to a collection of small, hand-built dams constructed by a former employee of the company that built and maintained the electric power system. Both the canyon and the wilderness were accessible largely due to roads, reservoirs and other infrastructure built during the system’s initial construction and which remained over decades for its maintenance. In both cases, the human origins of these wild places took center stage in legal, political and regulatory contests over their preservation with one question driving the conflicts – are dams compatible with the wilderness? In telling this story, Building the Wilderness will cover approximately a century of people, places and events in central California, beginning in its industrial landscape during the 1890s and ending in its high-country wildlands in the early 2000s.

“Power Grabs” is a hydropolitical history of metropolitan Los Angeles and its interconnected hinterlands during the period from 1890 to 1925. After deciding to transition to a regional energy landscape based on transmitted hydroelectricity in the 1890s, Los Angeles’ hydro-oriented municipal officials and power companies extended their reach north to acquire valuable Sierra power sites. In the process, hydro-rich hinterland spaces, namely the San Joaquin and Owens Valleys, were fundamentally transformed by Los Angeles-based power developers which favored certain areas, communities, and land use practices over others. Hydropolitical development decisions and conflicts, mediated by state and federal officials, turned the San Joaquin Valley into an energy-intensive space of irrigated agriculture and stunted growth in the Owens Valley. In turn, residents of these spaces increasingly opposed the export and control of their regional water-power resources by distant metropolitan outsiders. By the 1920s, politically influential hydro-protectionist and power opposition movements forced private and public actors in Los Angeles to turn to the Colorado River for their future power and water needs.In telling the interrelated stories of hydropolitically-shaped uneven developments in the Los Angeles basin, the San Joaquin Valley, and the Owens Valley, this dissertation incorporates recent scholarship on energy geographies, energy transitions, and hydropolitics to explore the ways that the materiality of an energy resource, transmitted hydroelectricity, can structure regional development. By emphasizing how the energy value of water was central to conflicts between and within Los Angeles and its hinterlands, this study challenges conventional narratives of Southern California’s transformation and highlights the mutually constitutive role that metropolitan power developers and their hinterland opponents played in this process. The hydropolitical legacies of the early twentieth century continue to shape and circumscribe infrastructure development decisions, water management policies, and patterns of land use in Los Angeles, Southern California, and the American Southwest more broadly.

The emergence and spread of electricity profoundly shaped the “long New South.” This dissertation traces the electrification of the US South from the 1880s to the 1970s. Focusing primarily on the Atlanta-based Georgia Power Company, it emphasizes that electricity’s rise was not simply the result of technological innovation. It was a multifaceted process that deeply influenced, and was influenced by, environmental alterations, political machinations, business practices, and social and cultural matters. Although it hewed to national and global patterns in many respects, southern electrification charted a distinctive and instructive path. Its story speaks to the ways the South’s experiences with electrification shaped larger American models of energy transitions and economic development, but also the ways it wrought dramatic changes in the fabric of everyday life.

This thesis investigates the ability, exercise and consequences of business power in environmental conflict in advanced capitalist society. Research into this subject has tended to fall into either of two camps; system-wide theoretical studies from within political economy or narrower empirical studies by neo-pluralist scholars. It is argued there is a need to reconcile these levels to see how the various mechanisms of influence coincide. The critical realist philosophy of science is used to clear the path for the project, detailing, among other things, an understanding of the nature of social being and of social scientific investigation. The various strands of literature on business power and the environment are reconciled in a two stage analytical framework. The first part of that framework deals with the dilemma of theorising about class in environmental conflict. The solution to that problem is found in value-form. This approach allows structural connections to be made between socioeconomic class and types of substantive value relations with the natural world. The second part of the framework deals with the issues of power and politics. It integrates the wider political economy approach and the narrower mechanisms of business power studied usefully by neo-pluralists. Two in-depth historical case studies of environmental conflict are carried out; the Black Head conflict over a quarry operation near Dunedin, and the much larger Whanganui River Minimum Rows dispute, both throughout the 1980s. At the end of each study the principles of the analytical framework are investigated in turn. It is ultimately concluded that the ability of business to dominate within this context is not absolute, yet it is real and pervasive. Such dominance poses a serious impediment to the achievement of sustainable relationships with the natural world, and the ability of people to participate in decision-making in respect to their environments.

The objective of this study was to reconsider the methods and routes by which electric power developed by the planned hydroelectric stations in the Waitaki Basin could be transmitted with due regard to planning systems. Power transmission methods are surveyed and discussed. The directions in which research is moving and the likely alternatives to the most commonly used method, overhead wire, are outlined. it is found that transmission by overhead wire is the only practicable method for transmission at the present time. The New Zealand power planning system is briefly explained. The relationships between each of the elements of the system are discussed. Improving the system by adding formal representation of a broad spectrum of disciplines and integrated national planning is suggested. Present power transmission from the hydroelectric works in the Waitaki Basin and transmission line design philosophy are reviewed. The merits and demerits of these are discussed. Two alternatives to the present system are given using the power corridor concept as part of the design philosophy. It is concluded that the first of these alternatives could have proven useful and that the power corridor concept could have much appeal to transmission line designers concerned about reduced costs in line maintenance and public amenity