Geography
Energy Pathways
Energy pathways refer to the routes through which energy is transferred and distributed. In the context of geography, this can include the transportation of energy resources such as oil, natural gas, and electricity from production sites to consumption areas. Understanding energy pathways is crucial for analyzing the geographical distribution of energy resources and the impacts of energy transportation on the environment and society.
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4 Key excerpts on "Energy Pathways"
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Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
eBook - ePubEnergy Justice
Re-Balancing the Trilemma of Security, Poverty and Climate Change
- Darren McCauley(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
This means that we need to embrace the future of energy as being inherently decentralised. Communities will need to involve themselves in energy production as much as they do today on consumption. Access must, secondly, become the central mobilising issue for consumption scholars rather than focusing upon narrowly achieving affordable prices (a laudable but secondary objective within the broader accessibility concept of both financial and non-financial means to accessing energy provision). The real global inequality in consumption remains the lack of access to energy inputs in developing and developed parts of the world. Affordability will of course remain an important concern, but should be secondary (or at least subsumed in) to access. The third pathway encourages us to embrace the low-carbon agenda by resisting the temptation to focus only on renewable energy sources. If we are to take the climate change crisis seriously, the search for low-carbon energy technologies must take precedence. A redistribution of energy burdens should, fourthly, be understood in both spatial and temporal ways. On the former, we need to redistribute the burdens not only at a given location, but also throughout the entire energy system. In relation to time, redistribution must be sensitive to historical trends in carbon emissions. The fifth pathway involves an explicit recognition of the environment—currently under-emphasised in energy justice literature. Lastly, innovation in mechanisms for including householders in consumption decisions must be developed further to encourage similar originality in relation to production choices
eBook - ePub- Zhenya Liu(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
Fourth, environmental impact is global. The ecological environment is a dynamic system subject to different influences. Any change locally will have an impact on the overall situation. Modern energy development has a significant influence on the global ecological environment, causing geological damage, environmental pollution, and climate change. These are threatening the survival and development of human society. Improvement of the ecological environment depends on taking a global perspective and coordinating and integrating energy development and distribution at an international level, with efforts on all fronts to protect the global environment.2.2.2. Historical
The global energy view was developed through long years of energy development, with an element of historical linkage. First, energy development is closely linked to the history of social development. The history of social development is also the history of energy progress. The low-level social development in primitive and agricultural society meant limited energy demand, with low energy efficiency. Animal power and firewood were primary energy sources. In an industrial society with rapid acceleration of productivity and social development, energy development has moved up toward electricity, nuclear power, and renewable energy from coal and oil. Our society is moving from industrial civilization toward ecological civilization. Second, energy development is closely linked to the progress of technological innovation. Along with the technological progress from hand-crafted technology to mechanization, automation, electrification, information, and network technology, the scale, efficiency, and economy of energy utilization are constantly increasing, facilitating the energy development mode to be transformed from one of low efficiency, extensive scale, high pollution, and high emission to one of high efficiency, energy conservation, cleanness, and low carbon emission. Third, all aspects of energy development are moving from lower to higher levels. It appears in the form of a shift from firewood and animal power to high quality coal, oil, and other forms of fossil energy and clean electricity. The energy development mode is transformed from exploitation of nonrenewable fossil fuels to clean renewable energy. The energy distribution mode is also changing from one of long-distance, low-efficiency railway, road, and pipeline transport, to instant power grid transmission. And energy utilization
eBook - ePubEnergy Transitions
A Socio-technical Inquiry
- Olivier Labussière, Alain Nadaï(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
2014 ; Lawhon and Murphy 2012 ; Bridge et al. 2013 ). The strong technological dimension of energy transition has sometimes led researchers even to shunt aside the importance of the spatial dimension.The deployment of new energy technologies is an important focus of the ‘transition studies’ (see the Introduction of this book). Both the ‘technological innovation systems’ and the ‘multi-level perspective ’ have produced conceptual frameworks to explain technological change and system innovations over time. Both of these approaches have conceptualised socio-technical systems as interrelated sets of actors, networks institutions and technologies/artefacts. But the spatial dimension (i.e. materiality, relationality, heterogeneity) that may influence the way these emerging constellations of actors come into existence has usually been neglected. The ‘multi-level perspective’ (Geels 2002 ; Geels and Schot 2007 ) has provided a conceptual framework to analyse systemic socio-technical transformations in relation to pre-constituted scales—‘niche’, ‘regime’ and ‘landscape’. But these scalar metaphors refer to the institutional structures and the maturity of socio-technological systems rather than their spatial dimensions and issues (Coenen et al. 2012 ; Lawhon and Murphy 2012 ). In other words, place has by and large been taken for granted by transition researchers, understood implicitly as a spatial container wherein socio-technical systems are located and innovations emerge (Murphy 2015 ; Gailing and Moss 2016
eBook - ePub- Pedro Ponce, Arturo Molina, Omar Mata, Luis Ibarra, Brian MacCleery(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
8Renewable Energy
The provision of energy or related energy services involves a huge variety of environmental impacts that are increasingly less tolerated by society. This is why the energy problem in conjunction with the underlying environmental problem continues to be a major topic in energy engineering, as well as in the energy and environmental policies around the world. From the current viewpoint, this attitude is not expected to change within the near future; the worldwide controversy about the potential risks of the anthropogenic greenhouse effect is only one example. On the other side, in view of the increasing knowledge and recognition of the effects associated with energy utilization in the broadest sense of the term, increasing complexity has to be expected.According to Max Planck, energy is defined as the ability of a system to cause external action. Many forms of energy are distinguished: mechanical energy, thermal, electric and chemical energy, nuclear energy, and solar energy. In practical energy appliances the ability to perform work becomes visible by force, heat, and light. The ability to perform work from chemical energy, as well as nuclear and solar energy, is only given if these forms of energy are transformed into mechanical and thermal energy.The term energy carrier, thus a carrier of the above-defined energy, is a substance that could be used to produce useful energy, either directly or by one or several conversion processes. According to the degree of conversion, energy carriers are classified as primary or secondary energy carriers and as final energy carriers, explained below:- Primary energy carriers are substances that have not yet undergone any technical conversion, whereby the term primary energy refers to the energy content of the primary energy carriers and the primary energy flows. From this energy, a secondary energy carrier can either be produced directly or by one or several conversion steps.
