Electricity and Energy Policy in Britain, France and the United States since 1945

摘要

A glaring disparity prevails between what the book's title promises and the book's size. The author obviously chose to be selective but still deals with topics that each is broader than any one short book can handle. Indeed, all his five topics have been the subject of multiple separate books. He covers the displacement of coal by oil, the European Coal and Steel Community, electricity pricing, electricity investment, and electricity restructuring. A further limitation is that except in the last case, he stresses coverage of the years for which the British and French thirty-year archive-disclosure restrictions have ended. Curiously, the thirty-year limit is more strictly applied to the readily updatable realm of data than to the actual developments. The effort to cover so much in so little space unsurprisingly produces breathlessness that makes the book of limited interest. Choppy organization aggravates the problems. In each chapter, he jumps too rapidly among topics. Too many inadequate treatments of details arise.