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The Future of Energy Ownership
Abstract
Suppose for a moment that it is 2050. Suppose, too, as increasingly seems to be the expectation in the energy sector, roughly half of the world’s total energy consumption is supplied by solar energy. That would require something like 100 TW of peak solar capacity, or 227 billion solar panels, roughly 29 panels per person on the planet. Who owns those 227 billion panels? It is literally a $100 trillion question, and one of the most consequential design choices confronting humanity in the coming energy transition. At one extreme, solar ownership might be spread broadly across the world’s nearly 8 billion people. At the other extreme, a small number of owners—whether public or private—could control most of the world’s solar energy supply. In between, are hundreds of different ways of configuring answers to who will own the world’s future solar panels. At stake in the future of energy ownership, I propose in this chapter, is not merely a vast economic resource but the character of political economy and democracy in the 21st century and beyond. Energy is constitutional of social, political, and economic order. As humans, the ways in which we work, move around, and exercise power are all tightly bound up with how we produce, organize, and use energy. As such, energy transitions are never just shifts in technology or fuel source but always also transformations of society and markets.
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This article will engage in an extended analysis of solarpunk, a richly elaborated speculative solar energy imaginary. It will ask, firstly, what solarpunk suggests about the formal, semiotic, and aesthetic dimensions of existing solar technology, and the kinds of fantasies such technology facilitates. Secondly, it will analyse how imaginary infrastructures figure a variety of social and technological elements necessary to transition, and how fantastical technologies are deployed to facilitate even the most empirical of transition imaginaries. Thirdly, it will ask what solarpunk suggests about the relationship between alternative energy imaginaries, community-building, and agency in the present struggle over energy transition.
Rural community energy projects in the Global South have too frequently been framed within a top-down technologically-driven framework that limits their ability to provide sustainable solutions to energy poverty and improving livelihoods. This framing is linked to how energy interventions are being imagined and constructed by key actors in the sector, via particular sociotechnical imaginaries through which a set of increasingly universalised energy futures for rural communities is prescribed. Projects are too frequently reverse-engineered through the lens of particular combinations of technologies, financial models and delivery mechanisms, rather than by attending to the particular energy needs/aspirations of individual communities. Assumptions over the association between energy access and livelihood enhancement have also reinforced a technocratic determination of appropriate system scale and a search for universalised ‘scaleable’ delivery models. There is, however, no necessary causation between scaleability and outcomes – appropriate implementation scales are not purely determined by technical or financial considerations, rather it is the social scale via which optimum forms of local participation and ownership can be achieved. To operationalise this concern for social space we propose a Social Energy Systems (SES) approach that is advanced via exploration of the interactions between three distinct but mutually edifying variants of energy literacy – energy systems literacy, project community literacy and political literacy.
We undertake a qualitative empirical study of the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry in order to investigate the role of diversity in stimulating innovation and diffusion. Based on evolutionary-economic concepts, we identify the main dimensions and components of diversity in the solar PV industry. Using nine indicators and additional information about recent developments regarding technologies, markets and actors (countries and firms), the dynamic potential is assessed for the various solar PV technologies. It is concluded that the dominant trend is an increase or maintenance of diversity among solar PV technologies, which likely contributes positively to innovation and diffusion. We discuss the implications of taking into account the role of diversity of solar PV in the design of energy policies.
In the context of large-scale energy transitions, current approaches to energy policy have become too narrowly constrained around problems of electrons, fuel, and carbon, the technologies that provide them, and the cost of those technologies. Energy systems are deeply enmeshed in broad patterns of social, economic, and political life and organization, and significant changes to energy systems increasingly are accompanied by social, economic, and political shifts. Energy policy is therefore, in practice, a problem of socio-energy system design. In this article, we offer a definition of socio-energy systems, reconceptualize key questions in energy policy in terms of socio-energy systems change, analyze three case studies of energy policy development as problems of socio-energy systems design, and develop recommendations for rethinking energy policy and governance in the context of socio-energy systems transitions.
The need for an integrated social constructivist approach towards the study of science and technology is outlined. Within such a programme both scientific facts and technological artefacts are to be understood as social constructs. Literature on the sociology of science, the science-technology relationship, and technology studies is reviewed. The empirical programme of relativism within the sociology of scientific knowledge and a recent study of the social construction of technological artefacts are combined to produce the new approach. The concepts of `interpretative flexibility' and `closure mechanism', and the notion of `social group' are developed and illustrated by reference to a study of solar physics and a study of the development of the bicycle. The paper concludes by setting out some of the terrain to be explored in future studies.
To overcome the negative impacts on the environment and other problems associated with fossil fuels have forced many countries to inquire into and change to environmental friendly alternatives that are renewable to sustain the increasing energy demand. Solar energy is one of the best renewable energy sources with least negative impacts on the environment. Different countries have formulated solar energy policies to reducing dependence on fossil fuel and increasing domestic energy production by solar energy. This paper discusses a review about the different solar energy policies implemented on the different countries of the world. According to the 2010 BP Statistical Energy Survey, the world cumulative installed solar energy capacity was 22928.9Â MW in 2009, a change of 46.9% compared to 2008. Also this paper discussed the existing successful solar energy policies of few selected countries. Based on literatures, it has been found that FIT, RPS and incentives are the most beneficial energy policies implemented by many countries around the world. These policies provide significant motivation and interest for the development and use of renewable energy technologies. Also the status of solar energy policy for Malaysia is investigated and compared with that of the successful countries in the world.
How the interplay between government regulation and the private sector has shaped the electric industry, from its nineteenth-century origins to twenty-first-century market restructuring.
For more than a century, the interplay between private, investor-owned electric utilities and government regulators has shaped the electric power industry in the United States. Provision of an essential service to largely dependent consumers invited government oversight and ever more sophisticated market intervention. The industry has sought to manage, co-opt, and profit from government regulation. In The Power Brokers, Jeremiah Lambert maps this complex interaction from the late nineteenth century to the present day.
Lambert's narrative focuses on seven important industry players: Samuel Insull, the principal industry architect and prime mover; David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), who waged a desperate battle for market share; Don Hodel, who presided over the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) in its failed attempt to launch a multi-plant nuclear power program; Paul Joskow, the MIT economics professor who foresaw a restructured and competitive electric power industry; Enron's Ken Lay, master of political influence and market-rigging; Amory Lovins, a pioneer proponent of sustainable power; and Jim Rogers, head of Duke Energy, a giant coal-fired utility threatened by decarbonization. Lambert tells how Insull built an empire in a regulatory vacuum, and how the government entered the electricity marketplace by making cheap hydropower available through the TVA. He describes the failed overreach of the BPA, the rise of competitive electricity markets, Enron's market manipulation, Lovins's radical vision of a decentralized industry powered by renewables, and Rogers's remarkable effort to influence cap-and-trade legislation. Lambert shows how the power industry has sought to use regulatory change to preserve or secure market dominance and how rogue players have gamed imperfectly restructured electricity markets. Integrating regulation and competition in this industry has proven a difficult experiment.
Revisiting the Terawatt Challenge - Volume 45 Issue 3 - Sarah R. Kurtz, Ashling (Mehdi) Leilaeioun, Richard R. King, Ian Marius Peters, Michael J. Heben, Wyatt K. Metzger, Nancy M. Haegel
This paper considers the potential significance of 'clean energy communities' (CECs) in the transformation of the present socio-technical regimes underlying our centralized energy systems, towards a more distributed and decentralized future. It explains the centralized, distributed, and decentralized sub-structures, embedded in current energy systems and energy markets. We analyze long-term dynamics and possible pathways of this transition, and the co-evolution of energy systems and communities, using an exploratory structure, drawing on insights from transition theories, innovation studies, and social network concepts. This includes analysis of the various forms of CECs - including virtual power plants, peer-to-peer trading, microgrids, and community-scale energy projects - emerging in a number of developed and developing jurisdictions, including Australia. This analysis suggests that low-carbon transition pathways will be varied, driven by social, technological, and organizational contexts, and shaped by institutional change processes, and interaction with the existing regime and incumbent actors. Social and technological entrepreneurs, and utilities, operating within an environment increasingly defined by energy consumers, industry groups, and policy actors, will need to be adaptable and innovative in choosing strategic directions, associated investment decisions, establishing appropriate alliances, and acquiring resources, to meet their goals in this low-carbon energy transition.
Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called "the economy" and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy-- the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. -- Book jacket.
Everyday life is defined and characterised by the rise, transformation and fall of social practices. Using terminology that is both accessible and sophisticated, this essential book guides the reader through a multi-level analysis of this dynamic. In working through core propositions about social practices and how they change the book is clear and accessible; real world examples, including the history of car driving, the emergence of frozen food, and the fate of hula hooping, bring abstract concepts to life and firmly ground them in empirical case-studies and new research. Demonstrating the relevance of social theory for public policy problems, the authors show that the everyday is the basis of social transformation addressing questions such as:how do practices emerge, exist and die?what are the elements from which practices are made?how do practices recruit practitioners?how are elements, practices and the links between them generated, renewed and reproduced? Precise, relevant and persuasive this book will inspire students and researchers from across the social sciences.
Energy forms and their extensive scale are remarkably significant for the ways that societies are organized. This article shows the importance of how societies are energized' and especially the global growth of fossil fuel societies'. Much social thought remains oblivious to the energy revolution realized over the past two to three centuries which set the West' onto a distinct trajectory. Energy is troubling for social thought because different energy systems with their lock-ins' are not subject to simple human intervention and control. Analyses are provided here of different fossil fuel societies, of coal and oil, with the latter enabling the liquid, mobilized 20th century. Consideration is paid to the possibilities of reducing fossil fuel dependence but it is shown how unlikely such a powering down' will be. The author demonstrates how energy is a massive problem for social theory and for 21st-century societies. Developing post-carbon theory and especially practice is far away but is especially urgent.
How it happened that technological prowess and national glory (or “radiance,” which also means “radiation” in French) became synonymous in France as nowhere else.
In the aftermath of World War II, as France sought a distinctive role for itself in the modern, postcolonial world, the nation and its leaders enthusiastically embraced large technological projects in general and nuclear power in particular. The Radiance of France asks how it happened that technological prowess and national glory (or “radiance,” which also means “radiation” in French) became synonymous in France as nowhere else.
To answer this question, Gabrielle Hecht has forged an innovative combination of technology studies and cultural and political history in a book that, as Michel Callon writes in the new foreword to this edition, “not only sheds new light on the role of technology in the construction of national identities” but is also “a seminal contribution to the history of contemporary France.” Proposing the concept of technopolitical regime as a way to analyze the social, political, cultural, and technological dynamics among engineering elites, unionized workers, and rural communities, Hecht shows how the history of France's first generation of nuclear reactors is also a history of the multiple meanings of nationalism, from the postwar period (and France's desire for post-Vichy redemption) to 1969 and the adoption of a “Frenchified” American design.
This paperback edition of Hecht's groundbreaking book includes both Callon's foreword and an afterword by the author in which she brings the story up to date, and reflects on such recent developments as the 2007 French presidential election, the promotion of nuclear power as the solution to climate change, and France's aggressive exporting of nuclear technology.
Biology and politics have converged today across much of the industrialized world. Debates about genetically modified organisms, cloning, stem cells, animal patenting, and new reproductive technologies crowd media headlines and policy agendas. Less noticed, but no less important, are the rifts that have appeared among leading Western nations about the right way to govern innovation in genetics and biotechnology. These significant differences in law and policy, and in ethical analysis, may in a globalizing world act as obstacles to free trade, scientific inquiry, and shared understandings of human dignity.In this magisterial look at some twenty-five years of scientific and social development, Sheila Jasanoff compares the politics and policy of the life sciences in Britain, Germany, the United States, and in the European Union as a whole. She shows how public and private actors in each setting evaluated new manifestations of biotechnology and tried to reassure themselves about their safety.Three main themes emerge. First, core concepts of democratic theory, such as citizenship, deliberation, and accountability, cannot be understood satisfactorily without taking on board the politics of science and technology. Second, in all three countries, policies for the life sciences have been incorporated into "nation-building" projects that seek to reimagine what the nation stands for. Third, political culture influences democratic politics, and it works through the institutionalized ways in which citizens understand and evaluate public knowledge. These three aspects of contemporary politics, Jasanoff argues, help account not only for policy divergences but also for the perceived legitimacy of state actions.
Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era
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Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World
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World, AK Press, Chico, 2010.
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W. Herche, Policy, Geospatial, and Market Factors in Solar Energy: A Gestalt Approach, Arizona State
University, PhD Dissertation, 2017.
Community Solar Imaginaries: framing distributed solar energy developments and just transitions in California and New York
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in California and New York, in: AGU Fall Meeting 2019, 2019. PA11B-0945.
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A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, Verso Books
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