Why did energy transitions historically happen? Energy transitions have been used as an important heuristic device for periodizing technological changes in the past few hundred years since the Industrial Revolution. Our historiography of the energy transition has featured several key turning points in the past: the first transition from biomass to coal, from coal to oil in the first half of the twentieth century, and the ongoing, albeit contested, transition to renewable energy. Within this field, we see two dominant interpretive frameworks. Mainstream scholars in economics and public policy typically view the energy transition through a Malthusian lens. The historical explanation they offer to understand historical energy transitions is usually through population growth, resource scarcity, demand-supply, and technological innovation. Recent works in sociology tend to focus on the social relations that constituted the production and extraction sites of energy, by paying specific attention to energy transition as the outcome of the contingent struggles on either the factory shopfloor or the extraction site. Using novel historical archival materials from colonial Manchuria, this paper offers a radical rethinking of historical energy transitions. I build on the recent arguments that most, if not all, historical energy transitions are in fact using a new source of energy to supplement and expand, instead of replacing, existing “relays of fossil energy production and consumption” (Brenner and Ghosh, 2025; Fressoz, 2024). And I further argue that in this process of supplementing new energy sources, state actors mobilized this opportunity to serve both symbolic and material state-building, particularly to simplify and standardize “energy” into a state legible unit of abstraction in order to better coordinate industrial production.