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.

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!

https://solarpunkmagazine.com/solarpunk-futures-podcasts/

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.

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.

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.