Country's transitional history

Select one country or region and examine the history of its transition to a new energy source. By “transition,” in this instance, I mean a shift to using this new energy source as a large proportion of overall energy usage, in circumstances where this change led to significant economic, social, cultural, and/or political changes. Coal and oil are probably the easiest to research for this, given the size of the literature on both and the important impacts they had on each society that adopted them. But you are free to choose a different energy source as long as it is one that had a significant impact on the society in question and you can find enough scholarly information to support your analysis. So, for instance, while you may have studied geothermal energy for your first paper, for this second paper probably the only workable case study for a transition to geothermal energy would be Iceland; Iceland is probably the only place where its introduction has led to a significant transformation. A case could be made in many places for wood, wind, water, certainly coal and oil, and perhaps for other sources – it might be best to ask me if you are thinking of using one not mentioned here.