This doctoral dissertation research project explores changing ideas about energy as global production shifts from fossil fuels to renewable sources. The co-PI (that is, the doctoral dissertation researcher) will examine the processes by which governments, NGOs, energy industries, and the media seek to influence the public imagination with regards to community values and their relations with local renewable energy projects. The research focus is on the differing conceptions of community and renewable energy as presented through promotional material about four specific community solar projects. The projects are located in Treviso, Italy, and Flagstaff, Arizona, two cities where solar power systems are becoming increasingly common. The co-PI will analyze how these ideas are produced, circulated, and received using mixed qualitative methods including semi-structured interviews with key individuals in the energy industry, non-governmental organizations, and in government; material analysis of pertinent images, texts, and objects; and engagement with community focus groups.
Intellectual Merit
Despite the pervasiveness of energy production and distribution, the underlying processes often remains invisible to consumers. This research engages those directly involved in educating publics about community renewable energy initiatives. It studies the ideas about renewable energy (in this case, solar-generated electricity) that infiltrate everyday life through advertisements, informational campaigns, policy mechanisms, the availability of energy technologies, and in daily conversations. Researching this unique space is crucial for understanding how publics, policy actors, NGOs, industry, and media interact to create a shared public understanding about social and technological change. The project will push the field forward by giving public uptake and reception the full attention it deserves through engagement with citizens.
Broader Impacts
The results of this study will be disseminated not only through academic journals (like Energy Policy, Environment and Planning, and Public Culture), but also through popular media outlets such as the Community Power Report, to which the co-PI is a contributor. The research will also engage in outreach efforts to Italian and Arizonan youth including those with populations underrepresented in STEM fields. Finally, this dissertation research advances the STEM career of a female, first generation college student, the co-PI.
Energy remains one of the world’s most complex, pervasive sociotechnological systems. Despite this pervasiveness, the concept of energy production and how it is delivered often remains invisible to consumers. Many discussions of solar policy are framed around controversies around either the economic costs and benefits, or the political economy of carbon based energy systems. The public dimensions of how ideas about energy become culturally embedded are less easily captured by such familiar discourses. It is therefore critical to gather nuanced examples, in places with existing carbon intensive energy infrastructure, like the US and Europe, of public engagements with emerging renewable energy sources, like solar power. The project assesses the diffusion of solar power technologies in the context of established sociotechnical systems. This research considers how publics might be more involved in the process of transitioning the energy system towards renewable energy. Practically, this project assesses how ideas about community contribute to the adoption of community-scale solar power projects. The Co-PI conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with municipal and provincial environmental managers, project engineers, a collective interview with four citizens that have solar arrays on their own roofs near Treviso, Italy and 25 interviews in her other field-site, Flagstaff, Arizona. She was also a participant observer for several renewable energy events designed to share information between energy agencies, governments, and citizens. Community-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) systems can complicate the current electricity producer/consumer system by potentially introducing collective decision-making by users that is often lacking in the context of investor owned electric utility companies. Project managers of emerging configurations of community-scale solar are experimenting with ownership models, neighborhood scale ground-mounted solar or smaller roof-mounted collective efforts, and finance structures. Importantly, definitions of community that encompass a wide geographical reach (beyond local or state, to national, international, or global scales) are more likely to map onto greater change in the energy system from centralized fossil fuel systems to local, distributed renewable energy systems. While the funding for this project has ended, the Co-PI is still in the process of completing the dissertation. As such the results of this study have not yet been disseminated. Throughout 2015, the Co-PI will be turning these case studies into tools for the classroom when she will be a Teaching Assistant for the course Human Nature and Technology with the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth program over the summer, and as an Instructor for the course Sustainability Science for Teachers at Arizona State University in the fall. Publication will begin in the fall not only through academic journals.
