Empowering the Great Energy Transition

Scott Victor Valentine is professor and associate dean of sustainability and urban planning at RMIT University. His books include Wind Power Politics and Policies (2014) and, also with Brown and Sovacool, Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy: Fifteen Contentious Questions (2016).Marilyn A. Brown is a Regents’ and Brook Byers Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she directs the Climate and Energy Policy Lab. A former utility regulator, she is a corecipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for the IPCC Report on Mitigation of Climate Change.Benjamin K. Sovacool is professor of energy policy at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, where he serves as director of the Sussex Energy Group and of the Center on Innovation and Energy Demand. His publications include Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles, and Practices (2014).

• PrefaceAcknowledgments1. The Great Energy Transition2. Sneak Preview of the Challenges to the Energy Transition3. The Uncertainties of Climate Change4. Managing Uncertainties While Promoting Technological Evolution5. Fostering and Financing the Energy Infrastructure Transition6. Policies for Driving Innovation and Expediting the Transition7. Consumers as Agents of Change8. Minimizing Governance Barriers and Creating Polycentric Networks9. Faster, Further, Farther: Empowering the Great Energy TransitionNotesIndex

Anyone offering or believing that bumper sticker solutions exist for reconciling global energy and environmental concerns in the twenty-first century should be humbled after reading this book. Valentine, Brown, and Sovacool offer an erudite, sobering, and compelling analysis of the complicated challenges, tradeoffs, and opportunities involved in transitioning globally to a renewable energy future. Writing in prose accessible to experts and laypersons alike, the authors adroitly integrate a multidisciplinary body of research (pro and con) to make a full-throated case for shifting to a renewable energy future. Readers may or may not agree with their arguments for an energy reset, but they cannot ignore the data, realpolitik, and strategic analysis the authors provide to explain and address the often halting and mostly patchworked progress made so far.