Innovation Group – CNS UCSB » Solar Energy Crisis

NASA has recently made two advances in studying the sun's effects on the Earth. The first is a new study that measures the Earth's "energy imbalance," the difference between the amount of energy it absorbs from the sun and the amount it releases back into space...

Solar News, 1-23-12

Mission-Sensitive Solar: Can We Site Large Arrays On Critical Military Bases? - Solar Industry Mag

Q-Cells sets two new world records for multicrystalline and quasi-mono solar modules - PV Tech

Engineers to pour water into volcano to make power - R&D

SDG&E opens up solar power to the masses - PV Tech The high price of climate change - R&D

Cleantech venture investment in 2011 reaches “the highest level since 2008” - PV Tech

Using Debt-To-Equity Ratios To Identify Potential Solar Downturn Survivors - Seeking Alpha

Top executives from 14 leading Chinese PV manufacturers gather to fight SolarWorld - PV Tech

A Clean-Energy Promise: Hope Meets Hype - New Haven Independent

Solar News, 12-30-11

In Solar Power, India Begins Living Up to Its Own Ambitions - New York Times

Dark Times Fall on Solar Sector - Wall Street Journal

Understanding End-User Markets For Grid-Scale Energy Storage - Seeking Alpha

Incredible UK solar installation figures revealed - PV Tech

PV installations to hit 23.8GW, a 34% increase over 2010, according to IHS - PV Tech

Report claims 50% of Chinese solar firms have ceased production - PV Tech

Buffett’s $2 Billion Solar Bet Receives ‘Attractive’ Power Rates - Businessweek

Report Finds Nano-Energy to be "Greenwashing"

This extensive 2010 report, released by international environmentalist organization Friends of the Earth, surveys many nanotechnology products being researched, developed, or already on the market related to energy production and storage. The authors of the report note that nanotechnology advocates have been promising huge gains in energy generation and storage efficiency and flexibility for many years; for the most part, these gains haven’t been realized. More troubling, according to the authors of the report, are the lack of life cycle analysis of various nanotech products, and “greenwashing” that take the form of claiming great gains in energy conversion in the field while completely ignoring the energy costs that have gone into the making of the products themselves, as well as the environmental risks associated with releasing nanoparticles into the environment.

Yahya M. Madra and Ceron Özselçuk: "Jouissance and Antagonism in the Forms of the Commune: A Critique of Biopolitical Subjectivity"

Madra and Özselçuk find that with regard to the construction of subjectivity, both the governmentality literature (as typified by Foucault) and the post-Fordist literature (as typified by Hardt and Negri) are compromised by embedded forms of behaviorism in their attempts to theorize the neoliberal subject. Foucault errs in assuming that neoliberalism actually produces the rational subject that it posits, when in fact this subject is a fiction (that even the neoliberal literature doesn’t assume is real at the level of the individual).

Travis Bradford, "Solar Revolution: The Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry"

Bradford argues in “Solar Revolution” that a transition to a worldwide energy economy based primarily upon solar collection is not only inevitable but in fact imminent. This is a surprising stance given that solar energy accounts for less than 1% of today’s electricity generation, is critically underfunded with regard to its competitors, and is generally considered to be economically uncompetitive. Bradford’s argument, however, is predictive rather than prescriptive...

Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?"

Langdon Winner's classic article argues, in the vein of “soft” technological determinism, that technology determines certain social foundations. In this case, that (at least some) technology is inherently political: certain technologies are democratic, others autocratic, by their very nature. That is, regardless of the intent behind their invention or deployment, they have concrete social consequences that can be qualified in political terms. While it is energy production that is ultimately at stake, Winner's most salient example is the series of expressways erected around Long Island by Robert Moses in the 1930s.

Charles Weiss, William B. Bonvillian, "Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution"

In this thoughtful, comprehensive book, Weiss and Bonvillian argue for a coherent, long-term approach to U.S. energy policy that balances market/demand pull and technology push. The former, they insist (embodied in a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system) is not sufficient to fundamentally change either U.S. energy independence or GHG emissions. They call for "a new integrated analytic framework." The framework would need to be technology neutral; it must stimulate private sector competition, not promote or require any particular technology. It must also take into account that new technologies don't face an open, new market, but rather one saturated with cost-effective, politically supported, popular incumbent technologies; we should think of this competitive space as an "anti-commons."

Narayanamurti, Venkatesh, Laura D. Anadon, and Ambuj D. Sagar, "Institutions for Energy Innovation: A Transformational Challenge"

The authors of this paper focus on key concepts that they believe must be appreciated in order for government-funded research to effectively spur technological innovation in the energy sector. They note that energy technology innovation is particularly complex and nonlinear. Energy technologies are often large-scale, must compete with incumbent technological systems (and thus must fight “lock-in”), and incommensurability in the scope and nature of goals between public and private sector. They recommend a model of “open innovation,” which encourages research organizations to share and look for knowledge with external institutions: individual inventors, start-ups, established labs, and various spin-offs.

Sustainability makes firms more profitable, MIT report shows

Over 1/3 of 2800 worldwide firms surveyed have explicitly adopted green manufacturing techniques and innovations, and these firms tend to be more profitable than their competitors.

New York Times Articles Examine Apple Outsourcing and Supply Chain Worker Abuses

New York Times article details Apple’s gradual outsourcing of labor during its explosive growth period, leading to the present situation, wherein almost no Apple products are manufactured or assembled in the U.S.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance Podcast

Rocky Mountain Institute, "Reinventing Fire"

The Rocky Mountain Institute, an organization founded by famed physicist and "soft energy paths" theorist Amory B. Lovins and his wife L. Hunter Sheldon to partner with industry to innovate technologies to increase energy efficiency and help transition to a soft energy infrastructure...

Solar News, 12-9-11

Why Solar Will Win - Forbes 5 Stocks for the Solar Surge - MSN Money Q-Cells reports record CIGS aperture area conversion efficiency of 17.4% - PV Tech Despite Solyndra's notorious failure, a few investors put new money in the sector - Wall Street Journal ‘Green’ Jobs, the IT Analogy - The New Republic Levelized Cost of New Generation Resources in the Annual Energy Outlook 2011 - EIA Report

DotEarth

Andrew Revkin’s New York Times blog is part travelogue, part science blog, and part musings on the challenges of a future marked by the radical alteration of the earth by its human inhabitants. Revkin travels to various environmental conferences and summits around the world to do a sort of meta reporting—many of his posts are about the activities and viewpoints of other journalists linked in a global network of writers working in this field. He also covers a lot of basic science of environmental and energy concern, and U.S. and international energy, science, and environmental policy.

Adam Rome, "The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism"

Rome's book explores, among other things, the brief rise and precipitous fall of the solar home vis-a-vis tract housing. His chronicle of the triumph of one material technology over another is rooted at the social intersection of the post-war mass migration to the suburbs and the rise of the environmental movement. In the 1950s, most individuals concerned about the degradation of the environment were conservationists. Their primary concern was the preservation of wilderness areas, not urban and suburban pollution...

B Von Roedern, H Ulal, "Critical issues for commercialization of thin-film PV technologies"

This article serves as a summary of the state of thin-film photovoltaic cell technology, circa February 2008. It notes that thin-film technology is rapidly taking increasing its share of the solar market (from 6% to 44% in the US in under three years). Particular attention is given to First Solar's 40MW solar field, in the process of being installed at the time in Saxony, Germany...

Kelly Sims Gallagher, "Acting in Time on Energy Policy"

The general theme of this book, which comprises a number of essays treating different facets of U.S. Energy policy, is that the U.S. government has been consistently short-sighted in its responses to looming energy crises, doing just enough to satisfy short-term goals and nothing more. If we remain on this path, it will lead to drastically increased costs down the road. The sooner we act, the less it will cost. Kelly Sims Gallagher discusses Climate Change in her chapter (which kicks off the book). She details international attempts made since 1990 to combat climate change, noting that while a number of industrial countries have met or exceeded their emission reduction goals (related in particular to the Kyoto protocol), the world's two largest emitters, the U.S. and China—together accounting for 46% of global GHG emissions—have increased their emissions drastically in the past twenty years.

Richard Newell, "A U.S. Innovation strategy for Climate Change Mitigation"

Newell here analyzes the market difficulties that act as barriers to climate change mitigation, along with the role played by science and technology innovation in the U.S., and outlines a plan to optimize federal investments in basic and applied research. Newell's plan is fiscal in nature; he focuses directly on the question of how federal money should best be spent. He identifies as two main barriers to climate change mitigation efforts a lack of market incentive to adopt GHG-reducing technologies and the underfunding of basic research in industry due to difficulty in recouping such long-term, public-interest investments.

Solar Energy Crisis

Solar News 8-6-12

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NASA: Modeling the Sun

Solar News, 1-23-12

Solar News, 12-30-11

Report Finds Nano-Energy to be "Greenwashing"

Yahya M. Madra and Ceron Özselçuk: "Jouissance and Antagonism in the Forms of the Commune: A Critique of Biopolitical Subjectivity"

Travis Bradford, "Solar Revolution: The Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry"

Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?"

Charles Weiss, William B. Bonvillian, "Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution"

Narayanamurti, Venkatesh, Laura D. Anadon, and Ambuj D. Sagar, "Institutions for Energy Innovation: A Transformational Challenge"

Solar News 7-23-12

Solar News 6-19-12

Solar News 5-29-12

Solar News 4-30-12

Solar News 4-16-12

Solar News 3-28-12

Sustainability makes firms more profitable, MIT report shows

New York Times Articles Examine Apple Outsourcing and Supply Chain Worker Abuses

Bloomberg New Energy Finance Podcast

Rocky Mountain Institute, "Reinventing Fire"

Solar News, 12-9-11

DotEarth

Adam Rome, "The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism"

B Von Roedern, H Ulal, "Critical issues for commercialization of thin-film PV technologies"

Kelly Sims Gallagher, "Acting in Time on Energy Policy"

Richard Newell, "A U.S. Innovation strategy for Climate Change Mitigation"