Texas is the leading producer of renewable energy in the U.S, and Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) is the largest metropolitan area in the state. Texas has a deregulated energy market, with three types of providers: privatized, public-owned, and co-operatives. Privatized providers compete in the deregulated market, and consumers choose between hundreds of electricity retailers. Public-owned providers are owned by the municipality, and electricity consumers that live within the city limits must use the municipal provider. Electric co-operatives operate similarly where customers within the region must use the co-operative, but instead of being owned by the city, co-ops are owned by the members (customers). To date, the availability, cost, accessibility, and outreach of renewable electricity among these provider types remains unclear. For this reason, my research examines the renewable energy market in DFW by asking: (1) Who has access to renewable energy and how do they understand it? (2) How do electricity retailers distribute and make renewable energy available? and (3) If consumers can choose their provider, why do they select certain electricity plans over others? My findings suggest that while many consumers want or are open to using renewable energy, uncertainties surrounding how to find or choose a provider, price, and lack of information about renewables are obstacles for consumers to access renewable energy. Additionally, while renewable energy is widely distributed in the region, there are disparities in renewable energy options.

The idea that we can 'save energy' has become a commonplace homily. But with a moment's reflection it is clear there is nothing self-evident about saving energy. Do we save fuel or a system's ability to 'do work'? Do we conserve for perpetuity or to prolong use? Is the motivation resource economy, scarcity, productivity, or - more recently - climate change mitigation? And what stops the fruits of individual parsimony being consumed elsewhere? This thesis offers a history of the idea that we can conserve energy by using it more efficiently. In recounting this story, it is argued that conserved energy is a 'metrological resource' produced by practices of measurement, calculation, and computation. A second argument is that the history of ERC offers an under examined example of a 'resource ontology'; the social processes through which nature is imbued with utility and value. Accordingly, the study of, what is termed, energy resource conservation (ERC herein) involved a novel research method which focused upon the scientific and intellectual processes of resource making, as much as the material. This thesis begins in 1865 with the publication of William Jevons' The Coal Question (1865), in which the resource conservative principles of Classical political economy were overturned. Jevons argued that increased efficiency of coal use would serve only to increase the rate and scale with which coal was used. Proceeding from this anti-thesis, the following chapters outline how, irrespective of Jevons' claim, policies based on the principles of scientific management were applied to the conservation of fuel resources for conserving natural resources. In pre-war America, a complex system of 'pro-rationing' extraction licenses were introduced to conserve the productive capacity of petroleum wells. However, a significant shift occurred during the Cold War, as the conservation of fuel became increasingly conflated with the econometrician's notion of efficient resource allocation. But the most significant developments occurred in the nineteen-seventies, in response to a perceived crisis in energy supply. Fuel policy became a more systemic 'energy policy', which drew on scientific management, graph theory, systems theory, statistical mechanics, and computational econometrics in an attempt to quantify and demonstrate how society could act to conserve energy resources by increasing the efficiency of energy use. The resulting science, and its concomitant policies were an odd mix of cold war rational decision making theories, détente science, scientific radicalism, and liberal economic theory, all given a countercultural and environmentalist gloss in the latter half of the decade. On the basis of this conflation of ideas, a new approach to energy saving that emerged, which transformed the principles of energy resource governance, shifting the onus to conserve from producer to consumer, with distinct implications for post-war theories of political economy.

Der Übergang vom fossilen Zeitalter hin zu einer kohlenstoffarmen Zukunft mit erneuerbaren Energien erfordert eine tiefgreifende Transformation, Reorganisation und Neukonfiguration des sozio-ökologischen Stoffwechsels, der insbesondere eine tiefgreifende raumzeitliche und politische Veränderung darstellt. Diese Arbeit analysiert diesen Wandel, indem sie die Rolle thermodynamischer Narrative untersucht, die im Zusammenhang mit der Elektrifizierung des Kapitalismus im Deutschland des endenden 19. Jahrhunderts aufgekommen sind. Sie geht der Frage nach, welche Bedeutung diese thermodynamischen Narrative für die lokale Umstrukturierung der Mensch-Umwelt-Beziehung in der kohlenstoffarmen Energiewende weiterhin haben. Anhand eines neuartigen Analyserahmens, genannt ‚kritische Thermodynamik‘, der diese miteinander verbundenen Beziehungen in einem historisch-materialistischen Kontext analysiert, werden drei Hauptargumente vorgebracht. Erstens führt eine thermodynamische Narration mit ihren materiellen Implikationen das menschliche Streben nach "grüner" Energie in einen gegenwärtigen Zustand, auf dem die wissenschaftlichen und politischen Einzelheiten eines zukünftigen Natur-Energie-Beziehung aufbauen. Zweitens, in der gegenwärtigen Phase der Energiewende produziert das Kapital aufgrund des Fokus auf die effiziente Verteilung erneuerbarer Energien neue ökonomische Formationen in Prozessen der ökologischen Modernisierung. Dabei wird die Energieflexibilität als zentrales Terrain für die Aufrechterhaltung eines Status Quos als Ausgleich infrastruktureller Defizite herausgearbeitet. Drittens steuert der Staat die Energiewende durch experimentelle Ansätze, die dem Kapital einen technokratischen Raum für seine notwendigen socio-ecological fixes bieten sollen. / The transition from the fossil fuel era to a low-carbon future of renewable energy requires profound transformation, reorganisation, and reconfiguration of the socio-ecological metabolism. Since this metabolism was initially built upon centralised thermal power plants, the move to a future system that predominantly lives of ‘green megawatts’ from decentralised renewable energy sources represents a major spatiotemporal and political shift. This thesis analyses such a shift by investigating the role of thermodynamic narratives, which emerged in the context of electrification of capitalism in Germany at the end of the 19th century. It addresses the question of how these thermodynamic narratives continue to matter for the localised restructuring of the human-environmental relationship in the low-carbon energy transition. Through a novel framework of ‘critical thermodynamics’, which analyses these interconnected relations through a historical materialist framework, the thesis makes three main arguments. First, a thermodynamic narrativity along with its material implications guides the human quest for abundant ‘green’ energy into the contemporary conjuncture on which the scientific and political specificities of the future nature-energy relationship are built. Second, because of a focus on the efficient distribution of renewable energy in the current phase of the energy transition, capital produces new economic formations in wider processes of ecological modernisation. Here, energy flexibility is exposed as a central terrain for maintaining a status quo despite infrastructural shortcomings. Third, the state guides the energy transition through experimental approaches, intended to provide a technocratic space for capital to perform its necessary socio-ecological fixes.

L’accident nucléaire de Fukushima en mars 2011 a eu des répercussions politiques différentes dans la trentaine d’États exploitant un parc de centrales. Tandis que l’Allemagne décidait d’accélérer la sortie du nucléaire amorcée dix ans auparavant, la Suède abrogeait le moratoire introduit en 1981 sur la construction de nouveaux réacteurs et la France ne s’engageait qu’à diminuer marginalement la part du nucléaire dans son mix électrique. Trois pays européens, confrontés à un même évènement, prenaient ainsi trois directions opposées. Par le passé, les différences de politiques nucléaires ont été expliquées par des déterminismes géographiques, culturels, évènementiels ou économiques. Cette thèse propose de dépasser ces approches pour considérer ces choix comme le résultat de rapports de forces entre opposants et soutiens à l’énergie atomique s’affrontant, à plusieurs échelles, pour contrôler l’usage du territoire. En s’appuyant sur la méthode de la géopolitique locale, cette recherche vise à mettre en évidence les rivalités de pouvoirs et les représentations qui structurent les systèmes d’acteurs dans chacun des pays, ainsi que les stratégies mises en œuvre. Dans un contexte de transition énergétique où le nucléaire est présenté comme une solution aux bouleversements climatiques, il s’agit ici, grâce à une approche comparative, d’identifier en Allemagne, en France et en Suède, les éléments ayant conduit à l’élaboration de politiques énergétiques diamétralement différentes. / The Fukushima atomic disaster had different political fallouts in the thirty-one countries where nuclear power is exploited. In Europe, while Germany decided to accelerate the phase-out engaged ten years before, the Swedish government repealed the moratorium on new nuclear reactors introduced in 1981 and France only committed to reduce marginally the share of nuclear electricity. Three European countries, facing the same event, took three different directions. In the past, differences between countries’ nuclear policies have been explained by economic, geographical or cultural determinism. This work offers to go beyond these approaches and to consider energy policies as the result of power struggles between opponents and supporters of atomic energy who fight to control the territory. Thanks to the local geopolitical approach, this thesis aims at highlighting the rivalries and the representation which structure the actors’ systems in each country as well as the strategies used in the conflict. In a context where nuclear energy is portrayed as a potential solution to mitigate climate change, the purpose of this work is to identity the elements which led to the elaboration of diametrically opposed energy policies in France, Germany and Sweden.

Text in English / In recent years, there have been tremendous advances in information technology, robotics, communication technology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, resulting in the merging of physical, digital, and biological worlds that have come to be known as the "fourth industrial revolution”. In this context, the present study engages such technology in the green economy and to tackle the techno-economic environmental impact assessments challenges associated with floating solar system applications in the agricultural sector of South Africa. In response, this exploratory study aimed to examine the development of a Geographical Information System (GIS)-based support platform for Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and due-diligence analyses for future planned agricultural floating solar systems, especially with the goal to address the vast differences between the environmental impacts for land-based and water-based photovoltaic energy systems. A research gap was identified in the planning processes for implementing floating solar systems in South Africa’s agricultural sector. This inspired the development of a novel GIS-based modelling tool to assist with floating solar system type energy infrastructure planning in the renewable energy discourse. In this context, there are significant challenges and future research avenues for technical and environmental performance modelling in the new sustainable energy transformation. The present dissertation and geographical research ventured into the conceptualisation, designing and development of a software GIS-based decision support tool to assist environmental impact practitioners, project owners and landscape architects to perform environmental scoping and environmental due-diligence analysis for planned floating solar systems in the local agricultural sector. In terms of the aims and objectives of the research, this project aims at the design and development of a dedicated GIS toolset to determine the environmental feasibility around the use of floating solar systems in agricultural applications in South Africa. In this context, the research objectives of this study included the use of computational modelling and simulation techniques to theoretically determine the energy yield predictions and computing environmental impacts/offsets for future planned agricultural floating solar systems in South Africa. The toolset succeeded in determining these aspects in applications where floating solar systems would substitute Eskom grid power. The study succeeded in developing a digital GIS-based computer simulation model for floating solar systems capable of (a) predicting the anticipated energy yield, (b) calculating the environmental offsets achieved by substituting coal-fired generation by floating solar panels, (c) determining the environmental impact and land-use preservation benefits of any floating solar system, and (d) relating these metrics to water-energy-land-food (WELF) nexus parameters suitable for user project viability analysis and decision support. The research project has demonstrated how the proposed GIS toolset supports the body of geographical knowledge in the fields of Energy and Environmental Geography. The new toolset, called EIAcloudGIS, was developed to assist in solving challenges around energy and environmental sustainability analysis when planning new floating solar installations on farms in South Africa. Experiments conducted during the research showed how the geographical study in general, and the toolset in particular, succeeded in solving a real-world problem. Through the formulation and development of GIS-based computer simulation models embedded into GIS layers, this new tool practically supports the National Environmental Management Act (NEMA Act No. 107 of 1998), and in particular, associated EIA processes. The tool also simplifies and semi-automates certain aspects of environmental impact analysis processes for newly envisioned and planned floating solar installations in South Africa. / Geography / M.Sc. (Geography)