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Energy-Based Economic Development: How Clean Energy can Drive Development and Stimulate Economic Growth
Energy is becoming a prominent driver of economic development. Each year, billions of dollars are invested around the world by the public and private sectors in low-emissions energy development and energy efficiency planning. Energy-based economic development (EBED) is a domain that seizes the opportunities inherent in clean energy development to drive innovation and generate economic growth. Energy-based economic How clean energy can drive development and stimulate economic growth delivers working definitions, common approaches, descriptions of supportive policy mechanisms, and suggested metrics for evaluation. The book offers a unified framework for EBED that is supported by examples and leaves readers better equipped to design, plan, and implement EBED initiatives. Case studies illustrate how national and subnational initiatives adopt to a locale’s energy asset base, energy and economic development needs, and the context in which the initiative operates. Descriptions of the energy projects supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act offer insights about what worked and what did not and suggest ways in which governments can be better prepared to manage EBED projects in the future. This book provides the tools necessary to work toward simultaneous energy and economic development goals and facilitates discussion for an advanced policy agenda of energy efficiency, energy diversification, innovation-led economic growth, and job creation.
179 pages, Hardcover
First published March 31, 2014
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March 30, 2017
Man, this book must have had the best research assistancts ever. So much detailed and comprehensive information, they must have slaved away for hours and hours reading dry government reports and press releases and...
Okay, okay, I'll own it, the reason that I am the only person on Goodreads and perhaps in the world to have read, let alone reviewed, this book, is that I was one of those research assistants. The only reason I have a copy of this book is because my name is there in black and white, page v, Acknolwedgements, which I think is pretty effing cool.
So I bought a copy of it and read it, and, well, it's about as exciting as you would expect an academic psuedo textbook to be. I love some things about academia but the insistence on rigid, formulaic, overly structured thinking is not one of them.
"Let's come up with terms defining the types of inputs and metrics that may occur in any energy development program and then list which are and aren't used in each of a dozen examples. After 100 pages of this, we'll throw in a few paragraphs about whether what we just did even matters in any real-world sense."
I mean no disrespect to the authors, who I (obviously) know personally, and who are awesome, dynamic, intelligent people, but it's like once you get a PhD and have acquired laser focus on Getting Published, your brain literally reforms itself to this pattern. And I mean probably this book wouldn't have been published if they had tried to do anything else.
So that's the first half of the book, useful only if you are attempting to get your own PhD in a related topic. The interesting part is the second half, yes, yes, I'm biased, because that's the half that I worked on, but at least that half enters the real world and covers a pretty wide range of case studies where governments, private organizations, and frequently private-public partnerships have put together programs that simultaenously address energy and economic issues.
But as the book concedes, there's not a lot of information about how well these programs, well-intentioned though they are, actually work.
When reviewing evaluation studies of energy based economic development programs, the authors found that "The majority of the literature consists of modeling estimates performed ex ante or before the intervention occurs, rather than assessment of effects ex post or after implementation."
In other words, all those studies about "The $X million investment in wind turbine technology by The Federal Agency for BlahBlahBlah will produce y,000 jobs over the next z years" are just total guesses based on computer simulations and basically nobody has ever gone back after the fact to ACTUALLY MEASURE how many jobs were created. This is why my boyfriend is under a standing order to shoot me if I ever say I want to go back to school for a PhD.
Oh academia, I do not miss you.
Okay, okay, I'll own it, the reason that I am the only person on Goodreads and perhaps in the world to have read, let alone reviewed, this book, is that I was one of those research assistants. The only reason I have a copy of this book is because my name is there in black and white, page v, Acknolwedgements, which I think is pretty effing cool.
So I bought a copy of it and read it, and, well, it's about as exciting as you would expect an academic psuedo textbook to be. I love some things about academia but the insistence on rigid, formulaic, overly structured thinking is not one of them.
"Let's come up with terms defining the types of inputs and metrics that may occur in any energy development program and then list which are and aren't used in each of a dozen examples. After 100 pages of this, we'll throw in a few paragraphs about whether what we just did even matters in any real-world sense."
I mean no disrespect to the authors, who I (obviously) know personally, and who are awesome, dynamic, intelligent people, but it's like once you get a PhD and have acquired laser focus on Getting Published, your brain literally reforms itself to this pattern. And I mean probably this book wouldn't have been published if they had tried to do anything else.
So that's the first half of the book, useful only if you are attempting to get your own PhD in a related topic. The interesting part is the second half, yes, yes, I'm biased, because that's the half that I worked on, but at least that half enters the real world and covers a pretty wide range of case studies where governments, private organizations, and frequently private-public partnerships have put together programs that simultaenously address energy and economic issues.
But as the book concedes, there's not a lot of information about how well these programs, well-intentioned though they are, actually work.
When reviewing evaluation studies of energy based economic development programs, the authors found that "The majority of the literature consists of modeling estimates performed ex ante or before the intervention occurs, rather than assessment of effects ex post or after implementation."
In other words, all those studies about "The $X million investment in wind turbine technology by The Federal Agency for BlahBlahBlah will produce y,000 jobs over the next z years" are just total guesses based on computer simulations and basically nobody has ever gone back after the fact to ACTUALLY MEASURE how many jobs were created. This is why my boyfriend is under a standing order to shoot me if I ever say I want to go back to school for a PhD.
Oh academia, I do not miss you.
Displaying 1 of 1 review