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18 books match the query 'Renewable energy sources'

cover of After Oil

After Oil

Imre Szeman

West Virginia University Press, 2016

After Oil explores the social, cultural and political changes needed to make possible a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy. Written collectively by participants in the first After Oil School, After Oil explains why the adoption of renewable, ecologically sustainable energy sources is only the first step of energy transition.
 
Energy plays a critical role in determining the shape, form and character of our daily existence, which is why a genuine shift in our energy usage demands a wholesale transformation of the petrocultures in which we live. After Oil provides readers with the resources to make this happen.
 
 
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cover of Buying Time: Environmental Collapse and the Future of Energy

Buying Time

Environmental Collapse and the Future of Energy

Kaz Makabe

University Press of New England, 2017

WE KNOW, from repeated failures to predict and prevent catastrophes ranging from the Great Tohoku Earthquake to the global financial crisis of 2008, that complex adaptive systems, such as those found in nature or in economies, are actually very hard to predict, much less influence. Today, we face environmental degradation caused in large part by the use of fossil fuels, ever-declining efficiencies in extracting them, a pace of development for renewable energy insufficient for replacement of the fossil fuels we are burning through, and population growth that is likely to add two billion people globally by 2045. Despite partial recovery since the financial crisis of 2008, growth remains sluggish, and large budget deficits persist across much of the developed world. Meanwhile, developing states face their own challenges, stemming from unbalanced growth. Against this backdrop, and in light of the urgent need to pay closer heed to our environment, the last thing the world needs is an energy crisis triggered not merely by recurrent scares over supply, but by more lasting structural changes in our ability to use fossil fuels with reckless abandon. Buying Time applies lessons learned the hard way from the global economic crisis of the past decade, to offer an overview of the state of the environment and our energy future. Grounded in subtle thinking about complex systems, including the economy, energy, and the environment, this book underscores the connections linking them all. Kaz Makabe is a veteran financial systems expert who lived through the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. He nevertheless concludes that nuclear energy is the bridge than can help us cross over the abyss we face.
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cover of Clean Energy: Past to future

Clean Energy

Past to future

Peter Tavner

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2024

Clean energy provision and usage has a long history from an engineering perspective. This perspective can help understanding past and current developments at a time of increasing concern about climate change. Over many hundreds of years human beings have been extracting energy from their environment in various ways, many of which could also be acceptable in the future for achieving a lower energy carbon footprint.
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cover of Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

Ecologics

Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

Cymene Howe

Duke University Press, 2019

Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions.

In her volume, Ecologics, Howe narrates how an antidote to the Anthropocene became both failure and success. Tracking the development of what would have been Latin America's largest wind park, Howe documents indigenous people's resistance to the project and the political and corporate climate that derailed its renewable energy potential. Using feminist and more-than-human theories, Howe demonstrates how the dynamics of energy and environment cannot be captured without understanding how human aspirations for energy articulate with nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and the geophysical forces that are at the heart of wind and power.
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cover of Electric Mountains: Climate, Power, and Justice in an Energy Transition

Electric Mountains

Climate, Power, and Justice in an Energy Transition

Shaun A. Golding

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Climate change has shifted from future menace to current event. As eco-conscious electricity consumers, we want to do our part in weening from fossil fuels, but what are we actually a part of?

Committed environmentalists in one of North America’s most progressive regions desperately wanted energy policies that address the climate crisis. For many of them, wind turbines on Northern New England’s iconic ridgelines symbolize the energy transition that they have long hoped to see. For others, however, ridgeline wind takes on a very different meaning. When weighing its costs and benefits locally and globally, some wind opponents now see the graceful structures as symbols of corrupted energy politics.

This book derives from several years of research to make sense of how wind turbines have so starkly split a community of environmentalists, as well as several communities. In doing so, it casts a critical light on the roadmap for energy transition that Northern New England’s ridgeline wind projects demarcate. It outlines how ridgeline wind conforms to antiquated social structures propping up corporate energy interests, to the detriment of the swift de-carbonizing and equitable transformation that climate predictions warrant. It suggests, therefore, that the energy transition of which most of us are a part, is probably not the transition we would have designed ourselves, if we had been asked.
 
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cover of Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

Energopolitics

Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

Dominic Boyer

Duke University Press, 2019

Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions.

In his volume, Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind power and how it is shaped by myriad factors, from the legacies of settler colonialism and indigenous resistance to state bureaucracy and corporate investment. Drawing on interviews with activists, campesinos, engineers, bureaucrats, politicians, and bankers, Boyer outlines the fundamental impact of energy and fuel on political power. Boyer also demonstrates how large conceptual frameworks cannot adequately explain the fraught and uniquely complicated conditions on the isthmus, illustrating the need to resist narratives of anthropocenic universalism and to attend to local particularities.
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cover of Energy Culture: Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond

Energy Culture

Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond

Imre Szeman

West Virginia University Press, 2019

Energy Culture is a provocative book about oil’s firm grip on our politics and everyday lives. It brings together essays and artwork produced in a collaborative environment to stimulate new ways of thinking and to achieve a more just and sustainable world.

The original work collected in Energy Culture creatively engages energy as a social form through lively arguments and artistic research organized around three vectors of inquiry. The first maps how fossil fuels became, and continue to be, embedded in North American society, from the ideology of tar sands reclamation projects to dreams of fiber optic cables running through the Northwest Passage. The second comprises creative and artistic responses to the dominance of fossil fuels in everyday life and to the challenge of realizing new energy cultures. The final section addresses the conceptual and political challenges posed by energy transition and calls into question established views on energy. Its contributions caution against solar capitalism, explore the politics of sabotage, and imagine an energy efficient transportation system called “the switch.” Imbued with a sense of urgency and hope, Energy Culture exposes the deep imbrications of energy and culture while pointing provocatively to ways of thinking and living otherwise.

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cover of Floating Power: Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations

Floating Power

Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations

Gökçe Günel

Duke University Press, 2026

Floating Power considers the role of energy production on an international scale, challenging the idea that new infrastructures wholly replace older sources of energy. Shifting the discussion from energy transition to energy accumulation, Gökçe Günel engages with a range of electricity producers including hydroelectric, heavy fuel oil, natural gas, and solar power plants, noting their intersections as societies work to expand their supply at large rather than focus on one type of source. Günel uses the Ayşegül Sultan, a Turkish-built floating power plant in Ghana, as a prime example and vehicle to explore how state and corporate intervention impact energy technologies as every nation strives toward infrastructural expansion. Floating Power challenges the linear thinking and substitutive logic of mainstream energy discourse, instead showing how various power sources often expand and grow symbiotically.
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cover of Large Scale Grid Integration of Renewable Energy Sources

Large Scale Grid Integration of Renewable Energy Sources

Antonio Moreno-Munoz

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2017

As renewable energy sources have reached grid parity in many countries, the key to further growth of the share of renewables in the power mix is their integration with the power system. This requires a number of technical developments, for example in power electronics, to meet the need for increased flexibility and rapid dispatch. This book explores the new approaches to meet these challenges, such as increasing interconnection capacity among geographical areas, hybridization of different distributed energy resources and building up demand response capabilities.
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cover of Large Scale Grid Integration of Renewable Energy Sources: Solutions and technologies

Large Scale Grid Integration of Renewable Energy Sources

Solutions and technologies

Antonio Moreno-Muñoz

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2024

Key to the further growth of shares of renewables is their integration with the existing grid system including EV and sector coupling. This in turn requires technical developments to enable flexibility and dispatch. Approaches to meeting these challenges include hybridization of different distributed energy resources, forecasting and control, storage and demand response, and modelling. Technological advances are also being accompanied by changes in business models.
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cover of Our Energy Future

Our Energy Future

Lincoln Davies

University of Utah Press, 2025

One of the greatest challenges of our time is the transition to clean energy. As climate change disrupts natural and human systems, a successful clean energy transition offers hope to a world upended by an overreliance on carbonbased fossil fuels.

In Our Energy Future, Lincoln Davies shines a bright light on the challenges the transition presents, including energy equity, political partisanship, the need for holistic solutions, and adaptability in the face of change. Our Energy Future makes the case for why the United States’ current transition to clean energy provides our world with something we so desperately need today: hope.
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cover of Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy

Power Shift

Keywords for a New Politics of Energy

Imre Szeman

West Virginia University Press, 2025

Power Shift traces recent social and cultural shifts in how we understand and imagine energy, the environment, and the challenges of global warming. Across the globe, the need to transition to renewables has become the guiding reality of our energy present and future, despite continuing resistance to change. But what does this moment of energy transition look like for those struggling to make it happen in a way that benefits every individual and all communities?

Featuring brief essays on 101 key terms by scholars, artists, and activists from around the world and across disciplines, Power Shift offers an expansive, kaleidoscopic guide to the history of petromodernity, recent technological and social developments, and pathways to new energy futures. The book offers new insights into the emergent politics of energy, contrasting today’s environmental and climate movements with the geopolitical contests of the Cold War era. It explores the still unfolding story of energy transition by focusing on the ongoing struggles of communities and individuals against decisions made by corporations, governments, and international organizations.
 
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cover of Scenarios for a Future Electricity Supply: Cost-optimised variations on supplying Europe and its neighbours with electricity from renewable energies

Scenarios for a Future Electricity Supply

Cost-optimised variations on supplying Europe and its neighbours with electricity from renewable energies

Gregor Czisch

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2011

This book pursues the fundamental idea of using renewable energies in a rational and economic way in order to develop a climate-friendly electricity supply. As the most cost efficient solution, an electricity network for the whole of Europe and parts of Africa and Asia must be found. The sources of renewable and partly decentralised electricity generation could be connected in a comprehensive power supply to meet the electricity needs of an entire region.
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cover of The Great Texas Wind Rush: How George Bush, Ann Richards, and a Bunch of Tinkerers Helped the Oil and Gas State Win the Race to Wind Power

The Great Texas Wind Rush

How George Bush, Ann Richards, and a Bunch of Tinkerers Helped the Oil and Gas State Win the Race to Wind Power

By Kate Galbraith and Asher Price

University of Texas Press, 2013

In the late 1990s, West Texas was full of rundown towns and pumpjacks, aging reminders of the oil rush of an earlier era. Today, the towns are thriving as 300-foot-tall wind turbines tower above those pumpjacks. Wind energy has become Texas’s latest boom, with the Lone Star State now leading the nation. How did this dramatic transformation happen in a place that fights federal environmental policies at every turn? In The Great Texas Wind Rush, environmental reporters Kate Galbraith and Asher Price tell the compelling story of a group of unlikely dreamers and innovators, politicos and profiteers.

The tale spans a generation and more, and it begins with the early wind pioneers, precocious idealists who saw opportunity after the 1970s oil crisis. Operating in an economy accustomed to exploiting natural resources and always looking for the next big thing, their ideas eventually led to surprising partnerships between entrepreneurs and environmentalists, as everyone from Enron executives to T. Boone Pickens, as well as Ann Richards, George W. Bush and Rick Perry, ended up backing the new technology. In this down-to-earth account, the authors explain the policies and science that propelled the “windcatters” to reap the great harvest of Texas wind. They also explore what the future holds for this relentless resource that is changing the face of Texas energy.

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cover of The Renewable Energy Alternative: How the United States and the World Can Prosper without Nuclear Energy or Coal

The Renewable Energy Alternative

How the United States and the World Can Prosper without Nuclear Energy or Coal

John O. Blackburn

Duke University Press, 1987

Energy supply problems for the long run have not been solved according to John Blackburn, and they will reappear when the present temporary glut in the oil market ends. Now is the time, Blackburn argues, to plan an orderly transition to a sustainable energy future—before another crisis looms.
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cover of Twisting in the Wind: The Politics of Tepid Transitions to Renewable Energy

Twisting in the Wind

The Politics of Tepid Transitions to Renewable Energy

Oksan Bayulgen

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Why do governments insist on fossil fuels? Why do renewables face uncertain and inconsistent legal and regulatory circumstances that slow their market-share growth against fossil fuels? Oksan Bayulgen studies the political determinants of partial energy reforms that result in tepid energy transitions and shifts the geographical focus from front-runner countries of energy innovation to developing countries, which have become the largest carbon emitters in the world. Her in-depth case study of energy policies in Turkey over the past two decades demonstrates that energy transitions are neither inevitable nor linear and that they are often initiated if and only when promoting renewables is in the interests of governing elites and stall when political dividends associated with energy rents change. This book contributes to the debates on the nature and pace of energy transitions by analyzing the power dynamics and political institutions under which energy reforms are initiated and implemented over time. This timely topic will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, energy investors, and anyone interested in environmental studies.

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cover of Walking to the Sun: A Journey through America's Energy Landscapes

Walking to the Sun

A Journey through America's Energy Landscapes

Tom Haines

University Press of New England, 2018

On a winter day in 2013, Tom Haines stood in front of his basement furnace and wondered about the source of the natural gas that fueled his insulated life. During the next four years, Haines, an award-winning journalist and experienced wanderer, walked hundreds of miles through landscapes of fuel—oil, gas, and coal, and water, wind, and sun—on a crucial exploration of how we live on Earth in the face of a growing climate crisis. Can we get from the fossil fuels of today to the renewables of tomorrow? The story Haines tells in Walking to the Sun is full not only of human encounters—with roustabouts working on an oil rig, farmers tilling fields beneath wind turbines, and many others—but also of the meditative range that arrives with solitude far from home. Walking to the Sun overcomes the dislocation of our industrial times to look closely at the world around us and to consider what might come next.
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