Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions

Conflicts, controversies and cognate aspects

Edited by Siddharth Sareen and Abigail Martin

£20.00

ISBN: 9781800087293

Publication: October 01, 2024

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Solar energy is emerging as the world’s largest growing source of power. In recent years, its rollout and growth have produced effects far beyond electricity generation, including a series of cognate challenges and conflicts in diverse geographies of energy transition.

Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions focuses on how solar energy governance (both state-based regulations and more market-driven modes of governance) is evolving to address these conflicts in diverse empirical settings. Chapters and case studies by leading energy scholars explore various issues such as formulating new place-specific solar energy visions and strategies, financing specific deployment scales, expanding or replacing electricity infrastructure, accessing land, resolving conflicts surrounding competing land uses, incorporating charging technologies for transport and storage, adopting flexible energy production/consumption relationships, displacing fossil fuel energy production with renewables, enabling new energy ownership models, and addressing the many environmental and social injustices across the value chain of solar expansion including upstream extractivism and downstream waste.

Scholarship typically frames these challenges as tangential to the governance of solar energy transitions. By placing them front and centre, the book draws necessary attention to the many wider changes in society that are continuously developing due to the worldwide adoption of solar power.

Siddharth Sareen is Professor in Energy and Environment at the University of Stavanger and Professor II at the University of Bergen.

Abigail Martin is Research Fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit at University of Sussex Business School.

List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Acknowledgements

1 Cognate aspects of solar energy transitions
Siddharth Sareen and Abigail Martin
2 Finance and the solar transition: Project finance and tax credits as drivers of the US solar rollout
Conor Harrison
3 Energy communities as models of social innovation, governance and energy transition: Spanish experiences
Teresa Cuerdo-Vilches
4 Beyond power: The social situatedness of community solar energy systems
Karla G. Cedano-Villavicencio and Ana G. Rincón-Rubio
5 Can solar energy make up for a failing grid? Solar energy deployment in urban and urbanising localities of the Global South
Bérénice Girard, Alix Chaplain and Mélanie Rateau
6 Accepting idealised solar farm portrayals? Exploring underlying contingencies
Harriet Smith, Karen Henwood and Nick Pidgeon
7 Comparative visual ethnographies of the ensconcement of solar photovoltaics in the urban built environment of solar cities Jaipur and Lisbon
Siddharth Sareen
8 Community solar struggles in Portugal
Abigail Martin
9 Geopolitical ecologies and gendered energy injustices for solar power in Ghana
Ryan Stock
10 Governing Solar Supply Chains for Socio-Ecological Justice
Dustin Mulvaney