This book examines the technical, market, and policy innovations for unlocking sustainable investment in the energy sector. While finalizing this book, the COVID-19 pandemic is cutting a devastating swath through the global economy, causing the biggest fall in energy sector investment, exacerbating the global trade finance gap, worsening signs of growing income inequality, and devastating the health and livelihoods of millions.
The book offers a collection of articles selected from the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy and Environment. It addresses: impacts of high shares of wind and solar power on electricity delivery; prospects for cities powered by rooftop solar systems; technology innovations to enable smart grids and wireless powerless transmission; and policies for a renewable energy transition. With contributions from internationally renowned experts, the book addresses the vital topic of integration of renewable energy consistent with deep decarbonization strategies. Written for energy planners ad policy analysts, energy market professionals, technology developers, and utility engineers, Advances in Energy Systems is an essential guide to a multi-disciplinary understanding of our energy future.
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Among the many societal problems thrown up during a tumultuous twentieth century, it would be fair to say that “environmental problems” have been salient, and this salience has only grown as we entered the twenty-first century. Pockets of local pollution that popped up in the 1950s and 1960s, such as DDT, which led to thinning egg shells or methylmercury poisoning of fish and people in Minamata, Japan, were the harbingers of the larger and more dispersed crisis to follow—a crisis that has encompassed all aspects of human and nonhuman life, from deforestation and soil erosion to groundwater depletion and river basin closure in many river basins, from urban air pollution in Los Angeles to acid rain in Germany, and from dam-related displacement in China or India to Chernobyl- and Fukushima-type nuclear disasters. Cutting across all these locations, climate change, induced primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, is considered to be the “mother of all environmental problems,” not for its own sake, but for the way it introduces stress and uncertainties into this already precarious socioenvironmental situation.
The increasing deployment of bioenergy frequently raises issues regarding the use of land and raw materials, infrastructure and logistics. In light of these sometimes conflicting interests Advances in Bioenergy provides an objective and wide-ranging overview of the technology, economics and policy of bioenergy.
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Green Energy Economies offers insight into the major drivers that are shaping a new future powered by clean energy sources. Assembling cutting-edge researchers as contributors, the book provides a comprehensive account of the shift underway, examining in detail the complexities and intricacies involved with such a transition.
In 1934, Lewis Mumford critiqued the industrial energy system as a key source of authoritarian economic and political tendencies in modern life. Recent debate continues to engage issues of energy authoritarianism, focusing on the contest between energy-driven globalization (the spread of energy deregulation and the simultaneous consolidation of the oil, coal, and gas industries) and the so-called “sustainable energy” strategy that celebrates the local and community scale characteristics of renewable energy.
The authors discuss the utilization of water conservation-oriented rates (WCORs) to foster both sustainability of water provision and environmental stewardship, especially during periods of drought. WCORs are designed to promote conservation through such rate mechanisms as excess surcharges (ES), drought demand rates (DDR), inclining block rates (IBR), seasonal rates (SR), and time-of-use rates (TOU), and in a manner that is sensitive to regional, physical, and population/user characteristics. This report looked at states’ experiences with water conservation-oriented rates under both normal and drought conditions, and showed how states and utilities have coped with the social and economic implications of their implementation. The book was prepared at the invitation of the American Water Works Association
Significant changes to the architecture of the current energy system are inevitable due to mounting environmental problems. Addressing these threats will require a dramatically different approach to meeting energy needs than we currently practice. A key society at the crossroads of the ongoing energy revolution is South Korea. Its rapid economic development is admired and sought by many. At the same time, South Korea faces significant social and environmental challenges that, if not addressed, will make its achievements ring hollow. This volume reports a detailed portrait for replacing the current regime of energy waste and risk with one that builds on reduced use of energy to pursue the society’s social and economic aims. A revolution in energy consumption is needed for South Korea to take its first step toward a sustainable future. Yet, this volume demonstrates this revolution is technologically feasible and economically available. South Korea can, and we hope will, seize this opportunity for environmental leadership.
The contributors to this volume offer a detailed, analytically based challenge to the mainstream paradigm. At global, national, and regional levels, careful analyses of practical energy options such as conservation, renewables, micropower, new urban design, and environmentally sensitive rural development underscore the availability of sustainable futures that make the energy brownfields and blackouts and global ecological threats (such as climate change) of mainstream strategy unnecessary.
Global forces of technology and the development of global markets are transforming social life and the natural order. These changes require a critical examination of nature-society relations. Increasingly, modernization assigns the risks of modernity to those with the least power and greatest vulnerability to environmental harm. Conventional environmentalism, which focuses on critique of the effects of humanity against nature, is inadequate to the challenges of globalization. In particular, it fails to explain sources of persistent patterns of social injustice that accompany escalating environmental exploitation. As the capacity for environmental destruction expands, broader concerns about environmental injustice have come to the fore, including awareness of threats to whole cultures, ways of life, and entire ecologies. The volume’s authors consider the links between expanded patterns of environmental injustice and the structures and forces underlying and shaping the international political economy. Environmental justice is one of the most controversial and important issues in contemporary social science. Volume 8 of the Energy and Environmental Policy series challenges our understanding of environmental justice in a global context. It includes theoretical investigations and case studies by leading authors in the field.
This issue offers a critical analysis of the existing energy system, its resource and technology infrastructure, sources of political and economic support, and environmental implications. The analyses in this issue demand new ways of thinking that reach far beyond mainstream policy and technology prescriptions.
Promoted as a form of limitless, low-cost energy without the polluting effects of its fossil fuel counterparts, nuclear power has enjoyed unparalleled support in several countries. Despite the development of an extensive set of policy and institutional mechanisms to foster its use, nuclear technology has been troubled by a wide range of problems and continues to pose risks many believe are far greater than society should accept. The legacy of failure ranges from catastrophic accidents like that at Chernobyl to the declaration of bankruptcy by the Washington Public Power Supply System. Governing the Atom explores why support for the technology remains substantial.
This volume in the Energy Policy Studies series focuses on important interconnections between energy use and global change issues such as upper atmosphere ozone depletion and global warming. Policy options for meeting these challenges are explored in eight contributed chapters.
The development of alternative forms of energy supply since the mid-1970s has brought with it a range of new issues and concerns, ranging from nuclear waste disposal to land use planning for energy efficiency. This volume in the acclaimed Energy Policy Studies series brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to examine the relationship between energy and planning policy, with emphasis on urban and regional impacts. Like other volumes in the series, the articles included focus on the social, political, and economic dimensions of energy technology, resources, and use. The emphasis on issues of technological scale, resource allocation, environmental impact and quality, and urban and regional studies makes this a unique contribution to the literature.
The experience of the early 1970s taught us that an energy crisis requires vigorous planning and significant policy changes. This volume in the Energy Policy Studies series examines the planning challenge that the possibility of a new energy crisis brings and explores what experience has taught us about our ability to plan for such changes. The articles included cut across various levels of analysis, from local and regional to national and international, and contributors employ a number of analytical and disciplinary perspectives. Above all, they present energy planning as deeply interconnected with virtually all other kinds of planning, from economic and environmental to urban and transportation.
The Politics of Energy Research and Development examines and evaluates U.S. research and development policies to promote nuclear, solar, conservation, and other technology options. This volume is the third in the series Energy Policy Studies, which explores fundamental, long-term social, political, and economic dimensions of energy technology, resources, and use. Contributions represent a wide range of theoretical and policy perspectives, including sociology, economics, political science, urban and regional studies, environmental analysis, and history and philosophy of technology.
Urban form have been and continue to be significantly influenced by changes in the political economy of energy. The energy-city relationship has been central to the process of economic and technological development. The nature of the interrelationship between recent changes in energy and urban conditions and the constraints and opportunities these changes pose for our energy and urban futures is explored in this volume. A growing number of urbanists and at least some energy policy researchers have come to recognize its importance for both our energy and urban futures. This volume of Energy Policy Studies brings together representative research on a variety of issues raised by the changing energy-city relationship.
Technology has been the pacing element of change in energy production and use. Fueled by confidence that technological development alone would suffice as an energy policy, the social implications of energy decisions continue to be bypassed. In light of recent events, even the most committed advocates of energy technofixes have been forced to recognize that the social impact of energy choice can no longer be disregarded. The debate over energy technologies needs to be viewed in the context of the general issues surrounding the relationship between technology and social change. The choice of energy technologies is a choice about social futures. This volume is devoted to the relationship between technology and energy choice. The contributors to the volume all emphasize the centrality of social issues in determining the desirability and feasibility of energy futures.
Written 35 years ago, the book correctly anticipated the prominent role that solar electric power would play in modern life. Sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the edited volume includes early research leaders on the technology, its economics and policy needs. It is a worthy read for those who would like to know the history behind what is currently the fastest growing source of new electricity supply in the world and in the U.S.