scholarly journals The Role of Public Art in Solar Commons Institution-Building: Community Voices from an Essential Partnership among Artists, Community Solar Researchers, and Activists

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Kathryn Milun ◽  
Ellen McMahon ◽  
Dorsey Kaufmann ◽  
Karlito Espinosa
Keyword(s):  
Solar Energy ◽  
Public Art ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
University Of Minnesota ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
Community Justice ◽  
Governance Tools

In this urgent decade when American democracy faces the challenge of decarbonizing the U.S. electric grid and assuring that the economic benefits of our energy transition are equitably shared, many solar energy researchers and activists are searching for new ways to partner with the civic sector. Instead of treating energy users as passive customers, experts understand the importance of engaging community as active decision-makers, beneficiaries, and communicators for a just energy transition. Distributed solar technology offers more democratic potential than small savings on individuals’ electric bills. Energy experts working on the Solar CommonsÔ community solar model at the University of Minnesota are piloting demonstration projects with community partners in Arizona and Minnesota. These solar commons aggregate savings through power purchase agreements that create 25-year peer-governed revenue streams to support mutual aid and reparative justice work in neighborhoods. This article describes a Solar Commons research project in Arizona, with a conversation among the public artists who partnered with the legal research team to co-create communication and peer governance tools that will allow DIY Solar Commons to iterate throughout the US as a new institution in our civic sector. Images of the Solar Commons public art demonstrate how the artists helped expand the vision of solar energy from the iconic individual solar panel to a technology embedded in community justice and in a complex human-more-than-human environment.

scholarly journals Legitimating power: Solar energy rollout, sustainability metrics and transition politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110249
Author(s):  
Siddharth Sareen
Keyword(s):  
Solar Energy ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Renewable Energy Sources ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Solar Irradiation ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Sustainability Metrics ◽  
Energy Transitions

Increasing recognition of the irrefutable urgency to address the global climate challenge is driving mitigation efforts to decarbonise. Countries are setting targets, technological innovation is making renewable energy sources competitive and fossil fuel actors are leveraging their incumbent privilege and political reach to modulate energy transitions. As techno-economic competitiveness is rapidly reconfigured in favour of sources such as solar energy, governance puzzles dominate the research frontier. Who makes key decisions about decarbonisation based on what metrics, and how are consequent benefits and burdens allocated? This article takes its point of departure in ambitious sustainability metrics for solar rollout that Portugal embraced in the late 2010s. This southwestern European country leads on hydro and wind power, and recently emerged from austerity politics after the 2008–2015 recession. Despite Europe’s best solar irradiation, its big solar push only kicked off in late 2018. In explaining how this arose and unfolded until mid-2020 and why, the article investigates what key issues ambitious rapid decarbonisation plans must address to enhance social equity. It combines attention to accountability and legitimacy to offer an analytical framework geared at generating actionable knowledge to advance an accountable energy transition. Drawing on empirical study of the contingencies that determine the implementation of sustainability metrics, the article traces how discrete acts legitimate specific trajectories of territorialisation by solar photovoltaics through discursive, bureaucratic, technocratic and financial practices. Combining empirics and perspectives from political ecology and energy geographies, it probes the politics of just energy transitions to more low-carbon and equitable societal futures.

scholarly journals Optimization of Costs and Self-Sufficiency for Roof Integrated Photovoltaic Technologies on Residential Buildings

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (13) ◽  
pp. 4018
Author(s):  
Guglielmina Mutani ◽  
Valeria Todeschi
Keyword(s):  
Solar Energy ◽  
Energy Security ◽  
Energy Demand ◽  
Residential Buildings ◽  
Maximum Level ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
The South ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Photovoltaic Technologies

It is common practice, in the production of photovoltaic energy to only use the south-exposed roof surface of a building, in order to achieve the maximum production of solar energy while lowering the costs of the energy and the solar technologies. However, using the south-exposed surface of a roof only allows a small quota of the energy demand to be covered. Roof surfaces oriented in other directions could also be used to better cover the energy load profile. The aim of this work is to investigate the benefits, in terms of costs, self-sufficiency and self-consumption, of roof integrated photovoltaic technologies on residential buildings with different orientations. A cost-optimal analysis has been carried out taking into account the economic incentives for a collective self-consumer configuration. It has emerged, from this analysis, that the better the orientation is, the higher the energy security and the lower the energy costs and those for the installation of photovoltaic technologies. In general, the use of south-facing and north-facing roof surfaces for solar energy production has both economic and energy benefits. The self-sufficiency index can on average be increased by 8.5% through the use of photovoltaic installations in two directions on gable roofs, and the maximum level that can be achieved was on average 41.8, 41.5 and 35.7% for small, medium and large condominiums, respectively. Therefore, it could be convenient to exploit all the potential orientations of photovoltaic panels in cities to improve energy security and to provide significant economic benefits for the residential users.

scholarly journals “Solar Energy. Now”. Anticipating and Fostering the Energy Transition at the Sun New Energy Conference

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 190026-190026
Author(s):  
Mario Pagliaro ◽  
Mario Pagliaro ◽  
Rosaria Ciriminna ◽  
Francesco Meneguzzo ◽  
Vittorio Loddo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Solar Energy ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
The Sun ◽  
New Energy

scholarly journals Call for Papers: Empowering Systems for Mutual Aid and Care: Institution Building in the Commons Sector

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
IJPS Editors
Keyword(s):  
Original Writing ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Writing For Publication ◽  
Care Institution ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Submission Deadline ◽  
Interdisciplinary Journal

  The Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies will publish a themed issue in Fall 2021: Institution Building in the Commons Sector. The guest editors of this issue invite researchers, scholars, activists, and authors to submit original writing for publication in its Fall/Winter 2021 issue (Vol. 8 No. 2). The submission deadline is August 15, 2021.    

scholarly journals Jurisdiction shopping and foreign location choice: The role of market and nonmarket experience in the European solar energy industry

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Panikos Georgallis ◽  
João Albino-Pimentel ◽  
Nina Kondratenko
Keyword(s):  
Solar Energy ◽  
Location Choice ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Policy Coordination ◽  
Policy Support ◽  
Energy Industry ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Market Experience ◽  
Solar Energy Industry ◽  
International Strategies

Abstract Several countries provide policy support to specific sectors in order to facilitate industry transitions. While industry-support policies stimulate the growth of their target sectors, little is known about how such policies engender heterogeneous international strategies. In this article, we investigate how industry-support policies influence foreign location choices. We argue that firms engage in jurisdiction shopping, choosing to invest in countries with more generous policy support, but that this tendency varies markedly across firms. Specifically, we suggest that firms’ nonmarket experience exacerbates the effect of policy support on location choice, whereas market experience has less of an impact. Further, we propose that some firms view generous policies more skeptically than others, depending on the nature of their nonmarket experience. We test and find support for our predictions using a longitudinal dataset of foreign investments of firms entering the solar energy industry in the European Union. Our findings indicate that supportive policies stimulate the energy transition, attracting in particular foreign entrants diversifying into renewables or having more policy experience. At the same time, they suggest that adverse policy changes in one country affect how firms assess policies in other countries, highlighting the need for policy coordination at a supranational level.

Forecasting the solar energy development in the region

2020 ◽  
pp. 16-25
Author(s):  
B.V. Korneychuk
Keyword(s):  
Solar Energy ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Analysis Tool ◽  
Energy Capacity ◽  
Logistic Curve ◽  
Power Capacity ◽  
Growth Trend ◽  
Average Value ◽  
Global Trend ◽  
Exponential Trend

The problem of forecasting the dynamics of the development of solar energy in the region in the context of the global trend of energy transition is considered. The urgency of the problem is due to the fact that forecasts of the development of solar energy are usually characterized by relatively large errors. To solve this problem, the author proposed a multi-trend approach to constructing a regional function for the growth of solar power capacity. The method is based on the description of the dynamics of power growth in the form of the average value of logistic, linear and exponential trends. The weighting factors are equal to values that are inversely proportional to the errors of the corresponding trends. Based on this method, forecasts of solar energy capacity were calculated for Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America for the period 2017–2019. The validity of the method is confirmed by the fact that these forecasts are characterized by a relatively low deviation from the actual data. The author has developed a forecast for these regions for the period 2020-2023. It is shown that the reason for the low reliability of most forecasts is the desire to use the logistic curve as a universal analysis tool. This approach absolutes the logistics trend and does not take into account the specifics of the region. However, for some regions, a linear or exponential trend can serve as the dominant growth trend in solar energy capacity. In particular, the reason for the systematic underestimation of forecasts for China was the ignorance of the exponential component of the growth of solar energy capacity.

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