Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St. Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well supplied.

The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee, Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants and from nuclear-power stations.

Nuclear and other sources

Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about 20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained an intractable problem.

Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress, although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.

Coastal sites

The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports, where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant. In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products, iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United States.

Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel, copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.

Inland sites

Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are available and more oriented toward the market.

Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles. Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras, and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration. In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C., Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of critical social and economic problems.

More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends, in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for much of America’s fastest-developing industries.