It is now widely understood that societies must rapidly decarbonize to avoid the worst impacts of future climate change. To contribute to this urgent effort, academic libraries should develop an understanding of the carbon footprint resulting from their activities. This article shares the results of an effort at the Penn State University Libraries…

Because of many advantages associated with central utility systems, school campuses, from large universities to elementary schools, have used district energy for decades. District energy facilities enable thermal and electric utilities to be generated with greater efficiency and higher system reliability, while requiring fewer maintenance and…

Green Bay Packer coach Vince Lombardi is quoted as saying, "Winning isn't everything, but wanting to win is." Whether it's a major university or an urban school district, pulling together and developing a plan and being confident in the financing through performance contracting is the best way to meet student, taxpayer and community…

As a common form of renewable energy, wind power is generating more than just electricity. It is increasingly generating jobs for workers in many different occupations. Many workers are employed on wind farms: areas where groups of wind turbines produce electricity from wind power. Wind farms are frequently located in the midwestern, western, and…

Climate change, energy price spikes, and concerns about energy security have reignited interest in state and local efforts to promote end-use energy efficiency, customer-sited renewable energy, and energy conservation. Government agencies and utilities have historically designed and administered such demand-side measures, but innovative…

The Energy Challenge is an environmental education program that is administered to ninth grade students in the public schools of a small Midwestern city in the United States. The program is sponsored and administered by the two local electric utilities, and it has been going on for seven years. To determine the effectiveness of the program, a…

Climate change is only one factor driving growing numbers of cities throughout the globe to reconsider conventional approaches to electricity generation and use. In the U.S., this momentum is incorporating a shift away from centralized, supply-side approaches reliant on fossil fuels and nuclear power, toward more distributed, flexible, and cleaner…

Even as the conventional energy system is fundamentally challenged by the "energy-environment crisis," its adherents have presented the prospect of "abundant" and purportedly "green" nuclear power as part of a strategy to address the crisis. Surveying the development of nuclear power in India, this article finds that…

Climate change, rising energy costs, and other dilemmas raise the prospect for major change in energy-ecology-society relations. Two prominent proposals for change include: a nuclear power renaissance; and mega-scale renewable energy development. Both suggest that modern society will receive a rising stream of less CO2-rich kilowatt-hours, so that…

Since the mid-1980s, power sector liberalization has been embraced at different levels in the East Asian countries of China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The dominant rationale underlying power liberalization has been a quest for efficiency improvements, to be achieved by substituting private market activity for public regulations and by opening…

This article examines how local experiments and negotiation processes contribute to social and field-level learning. The analysis is framed within the niche development literature, which offers a framework for analyzing the relation between projects in local contexts and the transfer of local experiences into generally applicable rules. The…