• Energy Research

Abstract Building upon a selective history of so-called “wire evil,” and more recent social science research regarding public perceptions of electric infrastructure, this article explores renewable transmission lines as sites of tension between landscape aesthetics and environmental ethics. It reports the results of an ethnographic study performed at a utility-owned arboretum in Omaha, Nebraska and suggests a “power line poetics” may help balance the aesthetic experience of electric infrastructures and the ethics of renewable energy development.

S0165237021002515 Plastic materials have been crucial to the development of science, technology, and almost all aspects of modern progress since the mid-twentieth century. However, the increasingly unsustainable culture of plastic consumption and the accumulation of plastics in landfills, oceans, and broader ecosystems has also made negative, potentially irreversible environmental impacts. In recent decades, scientists and engineers have spent significant time and resources searching for more effective plastic waste management techniques based on thermochemical routes like pyrolysis. Indeed, plastic to fuel conversion has the potential to severely limit plastic pollution and to contribute to the circular economy, but industrial scale plastic pyrolysis has not been achieved. Therefore, this paper presents a bibliometric analysis and systematic literature review of pyrolysis-related articles in the Web of Science database published between 2001–2020. The resulting articles (n = 670) show that Spain is the most productive country in terms of total output and that there are an increasing number of researchers focused on this topic worldwide. The results also highlight the current landscape and future directions of plastic pyrolysis research based on the following hot topics: i) kinetic triplets as a vital component of plastic pyrolysis and scaling up processes, ii) catalysts syntheses and performance, iii) co-pyrolysis of plastic/biomass mixtures, and iv) reactor design and reaction parameters. In conclusion, the study offers a comprehensive overview of plastic pyrolysis progress, which will remain a major area of research for chemists and engineers in the coming decade and a powerful tool for environmental management.

Strategic narratives about the transition to sustainable energy systems, including those influenced by the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs), frequently incorporate utopian elements. These ambitious targets encapsulate future-oriented visions and postulate implications of technological advancements; they also often underrepresent or even bypass the multifaceted nature of socioeconomic diversities, planetary constraints, and persistent energy disputes. The genre of utopian science fiction can offer a valuable heuristic to elucidate the heterogeneous and occasionally unsatisfactory projections that emerge from the SDGs. Two seminal novels—Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020)—which we classify as “fictional energy utopias” (FEUs), present incisive critiques of contemporary energy mechanisms and practices and envisage equitable, resilient, and robust renewable energy systems and socio-technical structures. Through an approach that combines narrative and discourse analyses, these literary works are juxtaposed with selected indicators of three SDGs. The ensuing study underscores the primacy of the topic of energy in policy and its concomitant narratives in fostering collective endeavors toward sustainable development. It also amplifies the pivotal interconnections between SDG 7 “Affordable and Clean Energy,” SDG 13 “Climate Action,” and SDG 16 “Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions.” Employing FEUs to evaluate sustainability policies can substantially benefit researchers, policy architects, and public engagement coordinators by highlighting lacunae and limitations within prevailing strategic narratives and proposing potential enhancements to fortify their capacity to motivate collective action.

Clearly and accurately communicating the economic, environmental, and social benefits of solar PV prosumerism poses significant challenges. Previous research shows that government policies and public engagement campaigns can positively impact solar prosumerism; however, little is known about the quality and accuracy of information exchanged between rooftop solar installers and potential prosumers. This study addresses part of this gap with a mixed methods approach. First, a multimodal discourse analysis of installation proposals from seven home solar installers in Madrid shows accurate and reasonable financial benefits alongside incongruent social and environmental benefits. Second, the calculated efficiency of the seven proposed solar installations is compared with the efficiency of four different PVSC solar arrays using actual load and generation profiles. The results show that (i) the high variability of actual household demand on the minute-by- minute level significantly decreases self-consumption rate and profitability in comparison with the rates estimated using hourly or monthly, and (ii) the grouping of households into solar communities should significantly increase self-consumption and profitability. Therefore, using minute by minute time series in home solar estimations would reveal an added value and social benefit that is commonly overlooked. We conclude with recommendations for future research and multimodal communication campaigns that balance benefits of individual prosumerism and community solar.

Citizen science and citizen energy communities are pluralistic terms that refer to a constellation of methods, projects, and outreach activities; however, citizen science and citizen energy communities are rarely, if ever, explicitly aligned. Our searches for “citizen science” and “energy” produced limited results and “citizen science” and “energy communities” produced zero. Therefore, to outline a future direction of citizen science, its potential alliances with energy communities, and their collaborative contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals, we performed a systematic literature review and analysis of “public participation” and “energy communities” using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses (PRIMSA) guidelines. The results show four pathways through which current public participation in energy communities might be more explicitly aligned with citizen science projects: benefits and values, energy practices, intermediaries, and energy citizenship. Each of these pathways could engage citizen scientists in qualitative and quantitative research and increase scientific literacy about energy systems. Our call for citizen science to supplement current forms of participation builds from the “ecologies of participation” framework, itself an extension of co-productionist theories of science and technology studies. We conclude with a discussion of affordances and barriers to the alliances between citizen science and energy communities and their potential contributions to SDGs 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, 13: Climate Action, and 17: Partnerships for the Goals.

Codes and quotes used for the analysis of Greta and Gates' books through rhetorical frames.