Putting people at the heart of the energy revolution
“For all the immediate challenges that we gather to address this week — terrorism, instability, inequality, disease — there’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate.”
— President Barack Obama, United Nations, Sept. 23, 2014
ASU is collaborating with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to explore the experiences of diverse Arizona small businesses and non-profits in the Phoenix area with efforts to reduce carbon emissions from their operations and facilities. The goal of the project is to understand how businesses are advancing sustainability and clean energy in Arizona — and the challenges they are facing in being able to do this.
The project’s ultimate goal is to generate insights about how the ability of businesses to reduce their carbon emissions can be improved and to share those insights with groups that support business sustainability programs.
We, at the ASU Center for Energy & Society, are looking for business owners and organizational leaders who would be willing to talk with us for 30-60 minutes. The purpose of these interviews is to get a rich understanding of what small businesses value and the opportunities and challenges you see going forward in the domain of sustainability.
If you are interested in participating, please contact me at clark.miller@asu.edu.
“One of the best presentations on environmental justice I have ever seen.” That’s what one of our kind audience members said about last week’s “Energy Democracy and Empowerment” webinar hosted by the Sustainability and Security Forum and moderated by center director Clark Miller.
Continue reading “Energy democracy: “Best webinar ever””
Photo from The Sustainable City, Dubai – a world leader in solar-powered urban development
It’s a real delight to share that the world premiere issue of Solarpunk Magazine is now officially in print and available over at https://solarpunkmagazine.com. I highly encourage you to check it out. It’s got everything. Great stories. Great poetry. An interview with the incomparable Kim Stanley Robinson on utopianism. Well worth the read.
If you aren’t familiar with Solar Punk, it’s a new genre of fiction that seeks to understand, through narrative storytelling, art, and practice, what new kinds of worlds might be possible should we choose to shed our carbon habit and groove to a sustainable future. It’s utopian alright, but with a punk twist: that hard look into the utopian underbelly that reminds us that getting from here to there will be hard and undoubtedly come with a few scars.
You’ll also find a bit of non-fiction sprinkled in, including an essay from yours truly, “It’s time to build solar cities”. My two cents, as followers of the center know, is that we’re going to need a LOT of solar and that there’s no good reason not to build as much of it as we can inside city boundaries, where we can do good things with it beyond just generating electricity–and where those benefits can flow to those who need them the most.
Continue reading “Building Solar Cities”
Joey Eschrich and Clark Miller, the editors of Cities of Light and The Weight of Light, join the Solarpunk Futures Podcast with Justine Norton-Kertson and Brianna Castagnozzi, the co-editors-in-chief of the exciting new Solarpunk Magazine, a place for fiction and non-fiction about energy, nature, and the possibilities of emergent and thriving human futures.
Listen in for an exciting conversation about the future of post-carbon cities, the possibilities of solar-powered communities, and the role of the imagination and fiction in teaching us truths about human futures. You won’t be disappointed!
Center Director Clark Miller recently participated in a fascinating dialogue with researchers from around the globe asking hard questions about how to better design energy systems to foster economic wellbeing for the poorest communities of the world.
Continue reading “Can community-based energy innovation help foster economic thriving and growth?”
A sustainable planet will not be a reality unless millions of poor and vulnerable people in marginalized communities around the world are capable of pursuing sustainable development goals locally. Such a pursuit is possible by leveraging shared knowledge, infrastructure and resources, including energy systems, in environmentally benign ways. The sustenance of high quality and productive energy systems, on the other hand, is conditional to the endusers deriving a high degree of social and economic value from energy services, making them invested in the system’s success. Ignoring and sidestepping this critical complementarity prevents thousands of vulnerable and poor communities from adopting clean energy systems and successfully pursuing sustainable development.
Continue reading “Let Communities Lead”
The Center for Energy & Society has been really busy exploring the future of energy and what it means for the future of human societies! Now you can share in what we’ve found. Check out our playlist of free videos.
What a treat, getting to talk to KJZZ‘s Fronteras desk about the future of solar-powered cities, with Andrew Dana Hudson, one of the amazing! authors featured in Cities of Light.
Today’s cities are powered by carbon. Tomorrow’s will be powered by sunlight. How will solar energy transform cities? Find out in our conversation with the Future Cities Podcast Team:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cities-of-light/id1285788731?i=1000527488760
Then download the book for free and find out for yourself what solar-powered cities might look like tomorrow:
How much solar energy can we put in cities? There’s sort of a default assumption that cities get their power from elsewhere, often from far-flung power plants in rural areas. And there’s a lot of solar developers thinking that way.
But solar is different, and there’s lots of opportunity to build solar in cities–and to create massive social benefit along the way. So how much solar energy can we put in cities? What can we do with solar in cities? And how much benefit would we create ? That’s what we set to find out from four of the world’s leading experts on solar energy.