[PDF] Visions Of Energy Futures eBook

Author : Benjamin K. Sovacool
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 13,71 MB
Release : 2019-03-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0429633998

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This book examines the visions, fantasies, frames, discourses, imaginaries, and expectations associated with six state-of-the-art energy systems—nuclear power, hydrogen fuel cells, shale gas, clean coal, smart meters, and electric vehicles—playing a key role in current deliberations about low-carbon energy supply and use. Visions of Energy Futures: Imagining and Innovating Low-Carbon Transitions unveils what the future of energy systems could look like, and how their meanings are produced, often alongside moments of contestation. Theoretically, it analyzes these technological case studies with emerging concepts from various disciplines: utopianism (history of technology), symbolic convergence (communication studies), technological frames (social construction of technology), discursive coalitions (discourse analysis and linguistics), sociotechnical imaginaries (science and technology studies), and the sociology of expectations (innovation studies, future studies). It draws from these cases to create a synthetic set of dichotomies and frameworks for energy futures based on original data collected across two global epistemic communities— nuclear physicists and hydrogen engineers—and experts in Eastern Europe and the Nordic region, stakeholders in South Africa, and newspapers in the United Kingdom. This book is motivated by the premise that tackling climate change via low-carbon energy systems and practices is one of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century, and that success will require not only new energy technologies, but also new ways of understanding language, visions, and discursive politics. The discursive creation of the energy systems of tomorrow are propagated in polity, hoping to be realized as the material fact of the future, but processed in conflicting ways with underlying tensions as to how contemporary societies ought to be ordered. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of energy policy, energy and environment, and technology assessment.

Author : Benjamin K. Sovacool
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 49,52 MB
Release : 2019-03-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0429632509

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This book examines the visions, fantasies, frames, discourses, imaginaries, and expectations associated with six state-of-the-art energy systems—nuclear power, hydrogen fuel cells, shale gas, clean coal, smart meters, and electric vehicles—playing a key role in current deliberations about low-carbon energy supply and use. Visions of Energy Futures: Imagining and Innovating Low-Carbon Transitions unveils what the future of energy systems could look like, and how their meanings are produced, often alongside moments of contestation. Theoretically, it analyzes these technological case studies with emerging concepts from various disciplines: utopianism (history of technology), symbolic convergence (communication studies), technological frames (social construction of technology), discursive coalitions (discourse analysis and linguistics), sociotechnical imaginaries (science and technology studies), and the sociology of expectations (innovation studies, future studies). It draws from these cases to create a synthetic set of dichotomies and frameworks for energy futures based on original data collected across two global epistemic communities— nuclear physicists and hydrogen engineers—and experts in Eastern Europe and the Nordic region, stakeholders in South Africa, and newspapers in the United Kingdom. This book is motivated by the premise that tackling climate change via low-carbon energy systems and practices is one of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century, and that success will require not only new energy technologies, but also new ways of understanding language, visions, and discursive politics. The discursive creation of the energy systems of tomorrow are propagated in polity, hoping to be realized as the material fact of the future, but processed in conflicting ways with underlying tensions as to how contemporary societies ought to be ordered. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of energy policy, energy and environment, and technology assessment.

Author : Mark A. Gabriel
Publisher : CRC Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 17,2 MB
Release : 2020-11-26
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 8770222576

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This book offers a unique insight into the corporate health of energy companies in an evolving landscape of deregulation. Cutting across both historical and present-day situations, it demonstrates important elements vital to the success of energy companies coming out of a safe regulated structure and dealing with a new competitive environment. Targeted at corporate executives, energy professionals, the financial and investment communities, strategic planners and regulators, readers will find this resource helpful to understand how energy companies can meet the challenges of a competitive environment, what it will take to evolve into healthy energy companies, the impacts of deregulation and assessment of successful and unsuccessful strategies for energy companies, the role of technology in business/product reinvention and a successful business model, and the differences and similarities of electricity to other commodities-the challenges to generation, power delivery, environmental science and end-use sectors of the business.

Author : Air Force Research Laboratory (Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico) Office of the Chief Scientist for Directed Energy
Publisher :
Page : 50 pages
File Size : 39,64 MB
Release : 2021
Category : Directed-energy weapons
ISBN :

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DEWs are currently being rapidly developed and proliferated around the world, and DE is globally considered to be a game- changing military technology. The impact DEW technologies will actually have over the next 40 years is still to be seen. This report only seeks to organize thoughts around a realistic vision for DEW technologies in 2060. Data gathered for this report shows that both in the past, today, and likely into the future, 2060, DEW proliferation will be driven by the requirements for three capabilities which will be needed to face enduring challenges. Over the next 40 years, we predict that even in a pessimistic case, the technology barriers for development of high-energy, high-power, operationalized DEWs will be steep, and investment in DE is the key to the U.S. and Allies retaining leadership in these tech areas. This report highlights with factual references to international developments that include ground based, air based, field demonstrations, naval deployments, and highlights several examples of how DE is used in operations today. We are at or near a critical tipping point in DE technology. The pessimistic, conservative, and optimistic alternative futures for DE military utility, proliferation, and technology advancement are described in this report, based on understanding of historical trends, knowledge of the current state of DE, other advanced technology areas, and predictions about major technology drivers over the next 40 years.

Author : Michael B. McElroy
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 44,86 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0190490330

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"In Energy and Climate: Vision for the Future, McElroy provides a broad and comprehensive introduction to the issue of energy and climate change intended to be accessible for the general reader"--Jacket.

Author : Simone Abram
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 13,1 MB
Release : 2022-12-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 311074564X

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Everyday life as we knew it is increasingly challenged in a world of climate, social, health and political crisis. Emerging technologies, data analytics and automation open up new possibilities which have implications for energy generation, storage and energy demand. To support these changes we urgently need to rethink how energy will be sourced, shared and used. Yet existing approaches to this problem, driven by engineering, data analytics and capital, are dangerously conservative and entrenched. Energy Futures critically evaluates this context, and the energy infrastructures, stakeholders, and politics that participate in it, to propose plausible, responsible and ethical modes of encountering possible energy futures. Imagining anthropocene challenges, emerging technologies and everyday life otherwise through empirically grounded studies, opens up possible energy futures. Energy Futures proposes and demonstrates a new critical and interventional futures-oriented energy anthropology. Combining the theories and methods of futures anthropology with the critical expertise and perspectives of energy anthropology creates a powerful mode of engagement, which this book argues is needed to disrupt the dominant narratives about our energy futures. Its contributors collectively reveal and evidence through innovative ethnographic practice how new knowledge about imagined and possible energy futures can be mobilised in engagements with emerging technologies, anthropocene challenges and everyday realities. In doing so it brings together authors, analytical expertise and ethnographic evidence from the global south, north and places in between, generated through innovative methodologies including remote video and comic strip methods and documentary video practice as well as long term fieldwork.

Author : Timon Wehnert
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 25,37 MB
Release : 2007-04-27
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 3540691650

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This book summarizes the results of an international research project; the first Europe-wide Delphi study on future developments in the energy sector (EurEnDel). Nearly 700 energy experts from 48 countries participated in this two-round, web-based Delphi exercise. With a time horizon of 2030, this expert survey not only provides a useful perspective on long-term developments of energy technologies, but also evaluates these technologies against different sets of social values or "visions".

Author : National Research Council
Publisher : National Academies Press
Page : 156 pages
File Size : 10,90 MB
Release : 2000-05-31
Category : Science
ISBN : 0309171857

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Vision 21 reviews the goals of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Vision 21 Program (DOE's vision for the future of coal-based power generation) and to recommend systems and approaches for moving from concept to reality. Vision 21 is an ambitious, forward-looking program for improving technologies and reducing the environmental impacts of using fossil fuels (petroleum, natural gas, and coal) to produce electricity, process heat, transportation fuels, and chemicals.

Author : Richard Caputo
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 32,3 MB
Release : 2022-06-01
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 3031794230

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Hitting the Wall examines the combination of two intractable energy problems of our age: the peaking of global oil production and the overloading of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Both emerge from the overconsumption of fossil fuels and solving one problem helps solve the other. The misinformation campaign about climate change is discussed as is the role that noncarbon energy solutions can play. There are nine major components in the proposed noncarbon strategy including energy efficiency and renewable energy. Economics and realistic restraints are considered and the total carbon reduction by 2030 is evaluated, and the results show that this strategy will reduce the carbon emission in the United States to be on track to an 80% reduction in 2050. The prospects for “clean” coal and “acceptable” nuclear are considered, and there is some hope that they would be used in an interim role. Although there are significant technical challenges to assembling these new energy systems, the primary difficulty lies in the political arena. A multigenerational strategy is needed to guide our actions over the next century. Garnering long-term multiadministration coherent policies to put the elements of any proposed strategy in place, is a relatively rare occurrence in the United States. More common is the reversal of one policy by the next administration with counterproductive results. A framework for politically stable action is developed using the framework of “energy tribes” where all the disparate voices in the energy debate are included and considered in a “messy process.” This book provides hope that our descendants in the next century will live in a world that would be familiar to us. This can only be achieved if the United States plays an active leadership role in maintaining climatic balance. Table of Contents: Introduction / The End of Cheap Oil / Carbon - Too Much of a Good Thing / Carbonless Energy Options / Conventional Energy / Policy for Whom? / Call to Arms / References